Just a quick note to bring you up to date on my efforts to fix the slow page loading that’s been plaguing Irreal lately. As I mentioned in my last update, the problem appears to be page generation not server response. Watching the transfer with tcpdump, I see that the server response and actual transfer of data is very snappy. It’s the time between the GET and when the transfer starts that the delay happens.
To deal with this I installed the W3 Total Cache but visitors were still seeing the delay. I tuned the cache a bit and now it seems to be working pretty well for me. Right after I push a new post, I’ve been loading the home page to get it into the cache but it occurs to me that many of you are coming to Irreal through RSS or Planet Emacsen and going directly to a single page. Therefore, I will also load each new page alone to get it into the cache as well.
If you are still consistently seeing a delay of over 20 seconds for the home or current page please let me know and I’ll try something else. Thanks for your patience and for those of you who have taken the time to let me know about the site performance that you are seeing.