Slow performance

Hi skim,

We're in a maintenance period at the moment which may be affecting the performance of the site. Please check back in a few hours - if the slowness persists we will look into it further.

editing sites still seems painfully slow on this end. Often takes over 30 seconds to save changes to blocks, can take up to a minute or two to save/publish theme edits.

Hi estiens,

Is one of your sites in particular affected, or is the slowness universal? Which browser are you working in?

Hi George, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. It seems pretty universal. Did a test across multiple sites and multiple browsers today and it was taking up to 2 minutes to save a simple change (ie; just changed text size through the TB and saved)

Firefox is faster than webkit (chrome/safari) but we are talking about an average time of 50-60sec vs an average time of 90-120sec, so pretty slow either way. Saving changes to a non-published theme seems faster than saving changes to the currently published theme, but not by much.

I would be interested in people's benchmarks as to how long it takes to make a change in themebuilder and save it.

Thanks, that is excellent info. We're working to improve the performance, and it will help a lot.

If I may ask a few more questions, do you notice a difference in speed depending on the number of saved themes on your site? Does publishing take longer than saving? Are you running any browser extensions? Where are you located geographically?

I am not running any browser extensions. I am in the US on a fast connection (20MB+) with a fine ping time to your servers.

It does seem to make a major difference how many themes I have saved. On a brand new site, a change takes between 5-8 seconds to save. On a site with many saved themes it is now taking upwards of 2 minutes. (same browser, same connection).

(or at least I assume that might be it, could be something else to do with a new site vs a more established one. I haven't yet save many themes in a row to see if performance degrades. In any case both stlcamp2.drupalgardens and catalystconsulting and catalystconsulting2 can take between 1-3 minutes to save)

But in any case, we are talking about 6-10 custom themes (usually incremental backups) not 100 or anything.

Publishing/Saving doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in time.

The amount of changes doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference.

Whether the changes are in the basic panel chosen WYSIWIG style or whether the code is written in the advanced tab doesn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks very much for the detailed report, estiens. I added all this to #AN-9217.

We are still at 1-2 minutes to make any changes in TB. Then sometimes up to 5 minutes for those changes to show up for an anonymous user (even with caching turned off as much as possible). This alone makes exporting our most likely option for future sites doing any significant custom theming, esp. where authenticated users see things differently than anonymous users, because it can add so much time to the process.

I know part of this is just the limitations of web-based editing, but still frustrating....

Hi estiens,

There have been some updates for themes that have improved the performance significantly - does your theme have an "update available" link in the top-right? That may help.

In regards to anonymous users, do you mean changes showing up from a content perspective or to review changes to a theme? If you hit any page as an anonymous user with a random query string (?wwewedacdfsaf=dvdvbdsdsfdsf or whatever) it will bypass the cache so you can review your theme changes. 

Hi estiens,

The deletion of themes in Drupal Gardens is now possible.  See our full announcement. 

Dear Drupal Team

Sadly, on a T1 line,  with good ping response times, I find your site to be very slow when making simple block edits in Chrome/ Safari / Firefox.  Working on Drupal via my BlueHost.com account is much faster.  I do like what DG offers , though.

I hope you will be able to better manage loads and increase performance.  The current speed will not permit me to offer DG as a platfrom for my clients.

Do you have any objective benchmarking tests that one can run to quantify speed status and compare it from day to day ?

THanks

Raf

Hi Raf and company,

We are actively looking at the performance issues people have reported here. Thank you for detailed reports. An internal ticket has been filed with our engineers tracked as DG-504 to take a deeper dive.

If new users are experiencing similar issues, they can add their comments to (those listed in this thread have been recorded already, thanks!):

http://www.drupalgardens.com/content/site-loading-very-slow

We will follow up once we have some more understanding and can take the appropriate measures as needed.

Hi Jeannie, I think you'll find that link doesn't exist!

It seems to work when you copy and paste the link in instead of clicking it.

I just created an account on Drupal Garden and even creating a very simple site is extremely slow: several seconds to open and save anything. It's really painful. Not sure I can use this.

I see it's been about a week since the reference to ticket DG-504 was posted.

Gardens sites always seem to perform painfully slow during and after an update. I assume it is now "after", since the what's new post has been posted.

Hi all,

drupalgardens is a great idea ... but not useful to us at this speed.

Hi nesscon,

We definitely understand your frustration with the performance issues, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.

After a thorough investigation, our Engineering Team discovered  that one of our database clusters recently became overburdened, and we are adding additional hardware to mitigate the issue which should be resolved shortly.

We do appreciate your patience as we continue to address these performance issues.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Hi nesscon,

A small subset of customers were impacted by an overburdened database cluster which affected site performance.

Resources have been allocated to take pressure off those affected sites. We added servers, and things should be much better; however we see that there is more we can do to move some sites off of a crowded DB server and into less crowded servers.  

We are working towards a resolution for that as well in the coming days.

In the meanwhile, let us know if you experience any more severe performance issues.

Thanks very much.

Best regards

Hi Stacy,

Thanks very much. It seems you've solved the problem. It is much better, so we can start

Best regards

nesscon

Hi nesscon,

Thanks very much for keeping us posted.

Best regards,

Hi, I'm having the same problem, when I'm editing my site the slow speed makes it almost impossible, I hope you can help me, last week editing was faster but today and the days before editing has been very difficult because of the slow speed.

Hello,

I haven't had a chance to try Drupal again since my post in the fall (sort of gave up on the idea). However in the meantime I have experienced issues using Chrome on a Mac. It brought my computer to its knees and I tried one of the suggestions I found online (I believe it was deleting the cache). It worked. Chrome treats every tab as a sort of separate process which is good when one tab crashes but it also implies more complexity to manage all the tabs.

I can't remember if the slow response I was getting with Drupal was isolated or not (ie caused only when using Drupal) but I thought I'd mention that. I'm thinking of switching back to another browser (Firefox probably).

Hi @ teotlqmb,

Your site is one of the small subset of sites affected by an overburdened database server as explained in our update post regarding Ongoing slow site performance. We are still in the process of moving these impacted sites away from this crowded database server and onto a new server which is a complex, and time-intensive project.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and we're working swiftly to resolve the performance problem. Thanks very much for your continued patience.

Hello @ fly-by-night,

I accessed your site and it seems to be blazing from my end using the latest versions of both Chrome and Firefox on a Mac OSX. Since your site is not impacted by the crowded database server, you should not be having the same kind of performance challenges as described in this thread.

Note that for the best experience designing your site appearance with the Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder, Firefox is recommended.

Internet Explorer 7, Safari 4, and Firefox 3.5 and older versions of these browsers are not supported for editing sites.

Please keep us posted if you continue to have issues. Thanks very much!

Best regards,

@ Stacy Wray

Thank you so much, I'll be checking the updates.