Why Mahalo is so slow?
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M$10 Answers
If you curl or wget some pages how long does it take? After looking at your profile I assume you're familiar with these tools.
Also, if your twitter profile is correct, the reason mahalo is slow is because you seem to be located in Prague. No matter how fast your connection is the latency from The US to Prague will be quite substantial.
I've been trying to speed up the site for the last year.
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M$It could be your connection. I haven't noticed the site unusually slow.
You can check your connection here:
http://www.speedtest.net/
Check it against a location in San Francisco or similar.
2)
Mahalo is growing fast and has had a few spikes of traffic. While seemingly not enough traffic to completely disable the site, there's enough traffic to slow things down.
3)
The code that runs Mahalo has a lot of external calls. Between Javascript libraries, analytics, cloud resources, etc... there are a bunch of external calls when pages load. While there are a lot of advantages to external resources, sometimes they can be a little unreliable or unexpectedly slow for a number of reasons.
4)
Mahalo isn't a big company. They have a small development / support staff. When problems happen, there are only a few people who can fix them.
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M$
@mshubin
My 4th suggestion didn't say that the Dev's weren't wicked awesome. It said that Mahalo doesn't have a large staff and the Dev team isn't huge. When there is a problem there isn't a sizable staff ready to jump on a bug.
You guys are busy folks who are working in a live environment. Youtube in contrast has stable code and production / release processes in place to ensure that cascade issues don't happen.
Agreed about the code requirements @mshubin.
Those no votes sting regular users like me a bit though... I'm happy to take criticism or correction, but in this case, I maintain that the size of the Mahalo staff is a contributing factor to the problems.
I bet if you had some help fixing some of the speed problems that your job would be a heck of a lot easier.
I think (3) is probaby the main factor. You can see it grinding loading external stuff a lot of the time.
Mahalo is one one of the slowest loading sites I visit, and always has been.
And in case you're wondering: 6Mbps, Firefox, XP.
I like 2, 3 and 4 as the most likely reasons. I personally HAVE noticed problems, infact I couldn't get to it over the weekend - on Saturday August 15 at noon Pacific.
Ahh... now this is interesting and an arena that I can speak as an expert in.
Yes, servers scale without staff. I also completely agree that well conceived and composed code can scale without additional staff as well. I've seen it happen and it's been amazing to watch.
Hardware, bandwidth, space, configuration and support all cost a lot of money and sometimes those expenditures aren't seen as a necessity until it's too late.
Best of luck with that :)
I would say #4 is inaccurate. While we are a small company with a lean staff our systems and development staff are top notch. Youtube has only 2 network engineers and 1 DBA, I think mahalo can get away with just one DBA (me) and one systems engineer. http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture
Most of our speed issues are actually because of user location in relation to Los Angeles, CA. This is a result of us being a smaller company, staffing is not. Without giving too much away, we are aware of the problem and working on many solutions.
@robbrown
Sorry about the unhelpful vote, I actually meant to undo that since I decided I didn't think your answer was unhelpful.
I actually think the size of our systems team is just fine at the moment, the thing that would help us the most with speed is an unlimited cash flow. Administering systems for a web2.0 company like mahalo is actually not really helped by more staff, IMO. It's been my experience that if things are done correctly from the start (which we;ve done for the most part since we moved to a new systems stack for mahalo 2) you can grow the systems without growing the staff.
Software development on the other hand can be helped very much by adding staff... sometimes. It all depends on management of the team. The mahalo development team needs more people, which is why we're hiring more people.
@robbrown
Thanks for the props. I agree with you about youtube's code base, but I think their systems, netoworking and data needs are just as demanding as mahalo's, but in very different ways than mahalo's.
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As others have pointed out, Mahalo is still a relatively young site, but its traffic has grown tremendously in recent months, and they are all working incredibly hard to get the site at optimum performance. Their dev staff is small, but they are incredible and I notice little improvements almost every day.
Hope this information helps!
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Here are a few things you should ask yourself about your Internet connection:
1. What is the speed of my Internet connection?
It might not be Mahalo, it might be your connection to the Internet. To test your speed, visit http://www.speedtest.net
2. Have you deleted your cookies? Check your cookies. Deleting your cookies can speed up your Internet connection.
Mahalo may be running slow because it's popular. Lots of people visit this site, and it takes a toll on the site!
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Well, its an overall thing. If there are too many cookies AND temp files, it can bog down a Windows machine a lot - in Internet Explorer. Pretty sure this doesn't effect Macs or Firefox on Windows.
Here's a good link on deleting cookies:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4716429_cookies-speed-up-internet-free.html
1. 1 mbps connection should be enough. Also not parts of the site are slow (search is very slow, but other parts are pretty fast).
2. Could you give more details about how deleting cookies makes internet connection faster? And which browser we are talking about?
If Mahalo is running slow because it's popular - maybe it is about a time to add more servers? :)
Check out the Traffic stats, even Alexa.com says it's slow therefore I think it's the server.
http://alexa.com/siteinfo/mahalo.com
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
I have a 1 mbps connection as well.
It is getting tiresome to see at the bottom of the screen:
"Waiting for www.mahalo.com"
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
it might be because of ajax based website
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Did you do anything in the last few days? I had been having serious page-loading delays, but they suddenly resolved.