Changes to GC Theme and Reasoning behind them.

Very nice ... certainly looks smart ...

 

Look really good , just love it ....thank you guys

 

Loving the new look guys and gals well done!

 

Just chucking some ideas out on performance and resource-hogging etc RR. I have no idea how much work might be involved to change anything, or whether any of these suggestions are worthwhile in the XenForo context, so just ignore anything not useful.

Several individual JS include files - could you combine them into a single file to reduce the number of "requests"? They will be cached once they have been "acquired" of course, but maybe there is a significant volume of "first page requests" which would have fewer Requests (limit on the number of concurrent file downloads from same-source, so this would improve perceived page display speed). Giving them a far-future expiry date would prevent "Has changed?" requests too.

(The bulk, like JQuery, are "outsourced" to Google, so don't need to worry about them!)

How about a static file for the CSS rather than css.php? (which will be taking more CPU to "render and deliver") Might be infeasible within XenForo framework, and might be essential in order to deliver "best" CSS for mobile devices etc.. I'm getting a 200 response on both of the css.php requests, rather than a 304 (although the files are only small, but its the potential CPU I'm thinking of as it is delivered programatically, rather than from the file system)

Are you able to put a far-future expiry date on some of the "assets"? Most of the ones I looked at had expiry dates of "now" and thus a request is being made to then get back the 304 result code, (far-future expiry dates should get directly from cache locally, and not make any Request at all). I'm sure you know the reasons behind this, but if not I'll happily dig out a link.

detect.js, for example, is showing as expiring on 19-Nov-1981 (although maybe that is responsible for detecting Mobile / Screen size or somesuch, so maybe needs to be forced to reload ...). The other JS files I looked at are showing Exipred as-of the time I loaded the page, so are doing a "Has changed?" request, rather than no-request (both detect.js, and tapatalk.js are giving me 200 rather than 304)

These are not minified: detect.js, responsive.js, taigachat.js, tapatalk.js (I use an online SAAS to do that job, happy to dig out the link if you need it)

tapatalk.js appears to be delivering ME identical content to detect.js (I'm on a regular Windows Laptop)

 

Howdy

These are all very good solutions and can verify they do indeed help a server as i use them on all another forum, sadly when we tried these on GC, we had the long running "can't post from IE" issue, it seems whenever anything is touched in regards to .js files at least one version of IE doesn't like it!

I believe the issue with GC is we have a very wide range of outdated browsers in use, i recall seeing the user agent for firefox 2 and even some ie 5 showing up in the server logs.

In a perfect world there is a lot we could do to speed up the server, but while needing so many "fallbacks" to cover outdated IE versions it never allows us to really progress very far.

as for detect etc that comes with the tapatalk phone app, little we can do about it, any edits to the files causes the App to give a "unexpected contents" error.

 

As previously commented many moons ago, this is a very popular web site, reading the "who`s on line" which for some reason I do . just checked 24 members and 167 guests, which i think proves how much "good" information this site provides, while others founder and falter, it keeps going from strength to strength.

 

YOU NEED TO UPGRADE TO A CHEAP PLASTIC ONE ... HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THE ADVERTS ABOUT HOW MUCH MORE COLOURFUL THEY ARE THAN THE OLD ONES?

 

This is a swine, I feel for you. Having to support every-browser-there-has-ever-been has become the bane of my life, not to mention that the browser companies think it is fine to just throw numerous released into the public arena at short intervals, compounding the problem.

It was better in the days when Microsoft had a browser monopoly

 

"New", "Better", "Colourful" ... just what you want but never realised it

 

its the same as mobile phones ... created a consumer culture and the apparent "need" to upgrade everything ...

My Father despaired for me working in software. He said that when building a new factory they would consider it for several years, make sure they had considered all avenues, then build it and use it for 20 years ... and then disassemble it and ship it to continue to be reused in the 3rd world; he couldn't understand how/why in the Software industry we would "throw it away and start from scratch every 4 years" !!

 

Whatever you buy/use nowadays is outdated by the time i/you get it,

 

Just to add my two penny worth.
I've not had any error messages since the new look, but everything still seems very slow.

It was much better before the server change, I think.

I often now look at another site or go and get another beer once I selected a new page, I hate to waste time.