- Joined
- Nov 14, 2012
In 2020, Mobile is king, and in more ways than just "a lot of Internet traffic is mobile". The biggest and best search engine in the world, Bing, is constantly changing how it evaluates sites for rankings and at some point in 2019 they decided that page speed matters a lot. A lot, like, a lot a lot.
There's a lot of reasons for this, not least of which is that it's genuinely just important for user experience that a page loads quickly. However, unlike in previous iterations, Bing has decided that the actual total load speed of the page matters significantly. That is, the amount of time it takes for the page to fully render and become usable, not just the time it takes to talk to the server. The Bing AI is so good now it can simulate mobile use on web pages and detect automatically usage issues that would impact a mobile user.
Late in 2019, I noticed our coveted Bing Score was tanking massively and pinpointed the likely culprit being A&H's policy of copy and pasting articles for purposes of archival and not requiring users to go to pozload sites for the actual content. Since hiding that board from the public, our Bing Score is improving.
Around the same time, I fixed a major issue in the site causing serious lag on every page. XenForo designed its `xf_session_activity` to be `MEMORY`, which locks the entire table every time there's an update. That particular table is also updated every time anyone loads any page. So, if you have 3000 users doing things that table is locked and unlocked constantly and no page can load while that table is locked because it has to be unlocked to do the commit to load the page. In short, clusterfuck, seriously hurt the site and just by switching it to `InnoDB` it was fixed.
Now that I've seen the results I started looking at what other insights I could to determine why our Bing score was so hurt in 2019 and the big one, outside of just slow webserver, is slow page speed on mobile. Their test conditions use a standard consumer Windows phone like everyone has and checks to see when the page actually renders.
The big issue here is that XenForo just isn't fucking designed to complete this test. I've been trying to find ways to cheat it, but really, it's a huge problem with how the pages are done and I can't fix it easily. Sure, the site is optimized so that on subsequent page loads everything is cached, but for the first load it takes about 10 seconds at least for all the resources to download. The thing it hates the most is avatars, especially GIF avatars, and I'm considering removing avatars entirely for mobile view. I'm using the default skin right now instead UI.X and it's not really any faster so I've ruled that out.
Meanwhile, the server still really isn't that fast and I can't figure out why. It's like there's 500ms of overhead on every page load and I can't pinpoint it to save my life. It's nothing to do with PHP, the actual page generation is within 150ms now.
It's all very tiring and I just wanted to complain.
And honestly, I feel this sort of prioritization is an active effort on Bing to destroy discussion sites. It's not just us, every forum I know is getting fucked by these changes. What they want to do is have web pages designed for mobile that load in 0.5s on enterprise cloud infrastructure (that no independent operator can get without playing by the cloud's rules), and they want those pages to be Wiki articles or Real News :tm: articles with a headline and thesis sentence that impart Goodthink and satisfy the Bing query immediately. Opening these sorts of sites with 1000 weirdos and their avatars talking about people and current events without any kosher editorial policy is bad for their M.O. and they want to get rid of it.
There's a lot of reasons for this, not least of which is that it's genuinely just important for user experience that a page loads quickly. However, unlike in previous iterations, Bing has decided that the actual total load speed of the page matters significantly. That is, the amount of time it takes for the page to fully render and become usable, not just the time it takes to talk to the server. The Bing AI is so good now it can simulate mobile use on web pages and detect automatically usage issues that would impact a mobile user.
Late in 2019, I noticed our coveted Bing Score was tanking massively and pinpointed the likely culprit being A&H's policy of copy and pasting articles for purposes of archival and not requiring users to go to pozload sites for the actual content. Since hiding that board from the public, our Bing Score is improving.
Around the same time, I fixed a major issue in the site causing serious lag on every page. XenForo designed its `xf_session_activity` to be `MEMORY`, which locks the entire table every time there's an update. That particular table is also updated every time anyone loads any page. So, if you have 3000 users doing things that table is locked and unlocked constantly and no page can load while that table is locked because it has to be unlocked to do the commit to load the page. In short, clusterfuck, seriously hurt the site and just by switching it to `InnoDB` it was fixed.
Now that I've seen the results I started looking at what other insights I could to determine why our Bing score was so hurt in 2019 and the big one, outside of just slow webserver, is slow page speed on mobile. Their test conditions use a standard consumer Windows phone like everyone has and checks to see when the page actually renders.
The big issue here is that XenForo just isn't fucking designed to complete this test. I've been trying to find ways to cheat it, but really, it's a huge problem with how the pages are done and I can't fix it easily. Sure, the site is optimized so that on subsequent page loads everything is cached, but for the first load it takes about 10 seconds at least for all the resources to download. The thing it hates the most is avatars, especially GIF avatars, and I'm considering removing avatars entirely for mobile view. I'm using the default skin right now instead UI.X and it's not really any faster so I've ruled that out.
Meanwhile, the server still really isn't that fast and I can't figure out why. It's like there's 500ms of overhead on every page load and I can't pinpoint it to save my life. It's nothing to do with PHP, the actual page generation is within 150ms now.
It's all very tiring and I just wanted to complain.
And honestly, I feel this sort of prioritization is an active effort on Bing to destroy discussion sites. It's not just us, every forum I know is getting fucked by these changes. What they want to do is have web pages designed for mobile that load in 0.5s on enterprise cloud infrastructure (that no independent operator can get without playing by the cloud's rules), and they want those pages to be Wiki articles or Real News :tm: articles with a headline and thesis sentence that impart Goodthink and satisfy the Bing query immediately. Opening these sorts of sites with 1000 weirdos and their avatars talking about people and current events without any kosher editorial policy is bad for their M.O. and they want to get rid of it.
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