Website Performance Feedback

Man, that sounds frustrating as hell. But don't give up yet.

What I can suggest, just to narrow down the possible problems: If you are using a laptop, how about going to a neighbour or somewhere very close by, log on to their Wifi and try there. See what happens.

Then try to log onto Wikiloops from their computer, see if it is any different.

Then do the same in a different place, at work or wherever that is not too close to your home. That way you will see if it is something on your computer, or the provider, your neighbourhood internet cable/server or Wikiloops. (in my neighbourhood we experienced a severe drop in performance some time ago, that was down to a fault in the line somewhere. Is fixed now, just an example).

If it is a problem that only occurs on your computer, then it can be solved. I don't believe there is a Wikiloops problem because then everybody would have it. Is it a US problem? Don't think so, we have a lot of US users and they would have told us.


Let us know what you get, we got a lot of clever people here and we will figure it out!

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I'm sorry to hear you're having such problems, Psycho - you can't leave us!

The normal approach is to do a process of elimination to try and figure out the problem. If you could answer these questions, it might help with a diagnosis. You may have answered some of these already so sorry about that.

1) What version of Windows are you on? If it's older than Windows 7, you might want to seriously consider upgrading. A lot of the latest browsers have problems or cannot run the latest versions, especially on Windows XP. Drop me a PM if you're on a version older than 7.

2) Do you have problems on other sites with heavy latency, for example YouTube or Soundcloud?

3) Do you run many add-ons/plugins on your browsers (AdBlock Plus, YouTube downloaders, etc.). I've known these to cause issues. I find the YouTube downloaders, in particular, cause problems with the general smooth running of the browser. Disable/uninstall each in turn and see if it improves matters. Especially the Flash plugin.

5) Uninstall and reinstall your browsers. You should consider downloading and installing CCleaner (www.piriform.com). This removes all the rubbish that builds up on a computer over time, hence its name being short for Crap Cleaner! Bear in mind that both these options will wipe any stored usernames/passwords you may use to automatically log into websites so make sure you can remember your logins!


I hope this may help.

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Thanks for your replies & TGs sensefull suggestions.
I hate to hear someone is experiencing technical problems, and I do know testing can be a frustrating process - so, @psycho, I do feel your pain, and I understand that you will want to give up at some point.

Since some of the information you have given does seem a little contradicting to me, I would like to point out a few more things, and I'll send you a simple testing way by PM right after.
Thing is - if the downloads are coming halfways quickly (what download speed is shown, please?), then I can't see why the streaming would be slow - the same mp3 file is transferred in both cases, so, if the stream is interrupted and the download is quick, the interruptio is not related to the stream being too slow.
This would be a strong indicator for some Javascript issue here, which I would have to fix.

Comparing wikiloops with some "other" streaming service whos headquarters may be in europe is not leading to reliable results - they may have servers in the US (I'd bet soundcloud does have), or they may be using something to serve lower stream quality to slow internet connections (like p.e. youtube does) - without knowing these details, it is hard to judge if your comparison is helpfull here.

I know this all seems overly complicated, welcome to my world of debugging :)
Will send you a test routine to check now, lets see where that leads :)

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Hi Dick, just to let you know that when my service does stall the stream, I am getting download speeds of 20-30kb/s (wikiloops downloads while the isp is supplying 12mb/s)
my connection works well otherwise and I'd assumed a combination of site user growth and geographic location was my problem.

Essentially I figured the servers upload bandwidth wasn't meeting demand and given the rapid growth of the user base I've noticed in the 7 months I've been a member, it seemed feasible.

I've not had experience with the scripting and website creation so I hadn't really considered that one.

I'll also be happy to test anything if you would find it useful.

I should note the streaming issue is not a constant problem for me and not an issue for me:)

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I am sorry I sounded so gloomy last night (I was a bit frustrated)... I have faith this can be fixed.

I don't want to leave... this is the only place I have fun on the entire internet.

I will keep trying and keep posting progress... for all that read this, take care and have fun :)

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I don't think there is anything you can do on your end, Psycho. Like you, I'm in the US and have been experiencing degraded performance over the last few weeks. No need to leave, man! I know it's frustrating, but it will probably get fixed.

I can also confirm the numbers that Jeebsie posted. I'm getting the same slow download speeds with a 12 mb/s connection from my ISP. Wikiloops is the only site I regularly visit that currently has performance issues.

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And to give my contribution on the topic. First, I apologize for bad English. From about ten days and I have a problem. The first 5-10 seconds streams are terribly broken, then fix things. I tried two different computers with different operating systems and browsers still the same. Home computer with the Windows XP sp3 + Mozilla latest version. Office - with Windows 7 Ultima + IE 9. Time zone between 15:00 and 21:00 Eastern European Time (Berlin +1 hour). But the problem arises with other sites based in Germany, I did not pay much attention. Reported from Bulgaria. I hope I helped.

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Seems to be working fine for me here in Nova Scotia. No major issues. Uploading here is like instantaneous, haha ... say compared to Youtube, which are much larger files, but still.

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Remote Old Fart's opinion:

Spare a thought for those of us who live in remote places with dial up speeds. Downloads and uploads 5 to 7 minutes each. If someone else is up at 7 AM (the best time to get through) and using the internet, it could then take 15 minutes or just crap out. Streaming? Ha! Can't watch YouTube (even at the lowest resolution) without stop/start.

If something is worthwhile you give it the time necessary. No point in letting it frustrate or giving up. I chose to live in these remote places and that's part of the deal. If I had to I'd be OK with making tape recordings and sending them by snail mail. Things wouldn't happen very quickly, but eventually they would happen. I might even spend more time thinking about what I'd play and practicing it....would that be all bad???

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I am having these troubles since some month - being one reason why I was less active since, but not the only reason. I have mostly no uninterrupted streaming - and only on wikiloops, not on youtube or any other music site, strangely.
Tried different browsers and constellations of plug-ins. No real improvement. I am in France, normally internet is fine.
Wade - your comment is helpful! Why not accept and work around the problem, having less expectations.

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Alright folks,
let's get this fixed up if we can... I know technichal details are not anyones favorite things to deal with, I'll try to explain in "normal humans" language as good as possible.

To me, taking care of this task is highly complicated - simply because the mentioned loading time problem does not seem to affect all users - if the site "went down" for anyone, it would be much easier to accept that there is something wrong on my end - since this is not the case, I'm relying on feedback from those who did experience problems in the past, please!

I spent the whole weekend doing load time testing, tried different browsers and simulated requests coming from remote areas, with focus on the United States.
I made quite extensive use of a service called http://www.webpagetest.org/, which allows you to measure page loading times from various locations - and to my surprise, the results were quite excellent. Any result showed response times way above the internet average, even during heavy traffic situations, and the very longest download time for a 5MB mp3 file was around 30seconds - which still seems totally fine, if you take to account that you'll have something above three minutes listening time downloaded by then.

So, am I about to tell you the issue is "your problem"? No, that wouldn't be user friendly, right?

So I went on, looking for other potential problems that might cause the described lag.

What I did notice is this: Chrome Browser does something special which leads to longer wait times. Any browser will download a segment of the mp3-file before it starts to play, to "buffer" situations were the player is playing, and the amount of data received is not covering the amount of data needed for the playback.
This is a good thing, since it will keep the player running if there is a short outage in data flow.
Now, Chrome does seem to be veeeeery conservative and does expect something around 60% of a file to download before it will dare to start playing.
If our average wikiloops track is five minutes long and 7MB in size,
Chrome will download around 4MB into the buffer before it will start playback, which may indeed take quite some time!
Firefox does not do that, so in my tests, it started playback a lot earlier than Chrome.
I spent quite some time trying to figure out if that can be avoided in chrome in any way, but the buffering mechanism seems to be non-controllable from the code end :/
Since Chrome is quite commonly used among the wikiloopers, this is not a happy result, and I also notice there are some problems reported which do not seem to be strictly related to the browser... so, take above as a side information.

My conclusion is: It doesn't seem to be enough if the mp3 data is coming in quickly enough to feed the players data-needs-per-second, it seems important to deliver the whole thing as quick as possible, which indeed is a different ballgame.

So, the next step I just took this morning is to move the mp3 hosting to a CDN network, thus reducing the distance and increasing the amount of servers available to serve the mp3 files. This "only" applies to tracks with a higher track ID than 55.000 for now,
so all recent tracks will not be served from the wikiloops server, but from a cloud server in either Frankfurt, NewYork or LosAngeles.
Your browser will try to get the file from the closest available CloudServer - should you be the very first to ask for the file, the Cloudserver will fetch a copy from the wikiloops server, which will be delivered from that Cloud on any following page visit from your area.
I kept the number of servers low on purpose to increase the likeliness of the files being present - If I added all 50 optional Clouds in the USA, your chances of finding a track stored for quick delivery in your local knot would be lower than they are now.

For anyone in Europe & the rest, we'll have to find out if the Frankfurt Cloud does perform better than the server in berlin - please let me know :)

Looking foreward to your experience and seeing the Clouds "saturate" as more and more tracks are fetched for the first time this morning, I really do hope this turns out to be a potential solution to keep up the good service we are used to on the loops.
I'll whine about the additional cost once we are decided to follow this strategy... :)



... very last thought:
Wade's comment is quite true! If you want your tracks to load quickly somewhere in the boonies (and yes, we do have these countryside holes in broadband in germany as well), you might want to upload your mixed tracks in 192k-Quality instead of full blown 320k-encoding.
We can do a lot on the technical end, but the fact that fast internet is not available everywhere is something to keep in mind as well!

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Thanks for the info Dick and the fast response.
I can gladly report that at the time of writing this response my streams are nearly instant and yesterday I downloaded quick than expected.
Cheers:)

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Thank you for all the investigative hard work, Dick. Just for informative purposes, I have not experienced any upload issues ever (from the US) and I use Firefox. The website almost always performs at 100% for me. :) Wishing the best for those having issues.

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Not sure if this helps narrowing things down, but I have regular 'stalling' events here, where the website dims down, but the actual page is not being rendered. Recovers when I do refresh. Very intermittent and not reproducible, but happens to me pretty much every other day at least once. I also occasionally observe playback not starting, again a refresh seems to fix it. This is on Mac with Chrome - could it perhaps be js related? I also still often get funky rendering when I play from the list view.

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I got the same thing as described by Joe, but this has been going for a long time. I just refresh and then it's usually good again.

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First of all: thanks Dick for the dedicated work on our problem which seems not on your side.

And: it works fine, it seems!!
Today I hear the works of the others without any stops and stumbling! B) :)
May it continue like this, then the full fun is back.
I had never problems with the pages or downloading, only while streaming.

B)

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I sure appreciate all you guys and your input, and most of all Dick for taking the time to work on a remedy. Today I called my provider to find out what the fastest available speed was and with the router I have there is a 24Mbps option. I was on the 15Mbps plan which has always worked well for all the gadgets I have plus wikiloops ran fine for a year. I asked if I could try the 24Mbps plan for a month to see if it would make a difference. It sounds like there has been a fix from reading Lutz post. So with that, and the work everyone has done, I'm on here today to let you all know that any track I play is loading instantly. It is 1:26 shoutbox time (normally the worst time for me). So far I've played about 10 tracks without a hickup. This is great news, and hopfully it continues to work. I'm going back out to the newsfeed to play and will keep you guys posted... thanks again everybody !!!

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