Roaming Gamer

I’m still worried that the response time for this site is less than stellar. So, I decided to seek professional help, or at least professional testing.
After a bit of searching, I came across a site (http://loadimpact.com) that would load test my page(s) for free, simulating up to 50 simultaneous users. This sounded like good deal (free is a great price), and a reasonable start (50 simultaneous users should be about my max for now).

So, I gave it a shot, and the results were… less that super. Actually the results were a little questionable since the test aborted at about 30 users, but for now I can see the following (click images for full-size graphs).

The user load-times dropped steadily from 10 to 30 users. This means I was not yet fully loading my site, so the data is only partially useful. However, the bad news is that for 10 or fewer users, the load times averaged 10.4 seconds. That bites! That alone makes me strongly consider moving to another provider. (We’ll see.)

Next, the ‘Home Page’ (only) load times were better (8.15 second average for10 users), but still not great.

Lastly, I examined the file load times and discovered something useful (although not surprising). Some files have exceptionally long load times. Specifically, one of the PNG files on the home page (inove.png), and the images from the ’sexy bookmark’ feature. Both of these files took an average of ~250ms to load. That kind of load time can add up pretty fast!
That is about all I know so far. I guess the moral of the story is, “get a good (i.e fast) provider and save yourself some heartache.” If anyone has suggestions for providers that can handle high-loads of wordpress sites, let me me know. Meanwhile, I’ll keep digging on my own.

Cheers,
edo