I am looking for system admin help. My programmer got me onto Linode and decided to move on after setting me up. I loved the whole concept behind Linode but I have no idea how to do any system admin. All I can do is system reboot.

My website www.frenchgeneral.com is running a bit slow and was hoping I could optimize its performance somehow.

I would love to work with someone on a regular basis and pay them. If anyone is interested, let me know, thanks

Jon

Just taking a quick look at your webpage there are a few things you could do to speed it up, although, on my connection it was pretty zippy.

1) An uncached viewing of the main page is almost about 666K. That's quite a bit, especially for a dialup user. It appears the majority of the size is due to images so you might look at reducing the size of some of the images (more compression, smaller size, etc).

2) Setup GZiping in your webserver. You take a bit of a hit cpu-wise but it's minimal.

3) Setup ETags and Expires headers. This will reduce save a lot of time for people that already have some of the webpage cached.

4) Since you're using PHP look at setting up a cache (apc, eAccelerator, etc).

This is by no means a comprehensive list of things, but it should give you some places to look.

Thanks for the tips. It is heavy on the images because Im basically a graphic designer that likes eye candy but not too savvy on the programming. I can downsize and compress images but for the other things you mention, I wouldnt know how to install them or where to find them. I am looking for someone to help me do it for $$$, if anyone is interested - my email is jon@frenchgeneral.com

Thanks

Jon

Very nice site. I particularly enjoyed the View from France.

Jeff

GaveUp:

just a few points:

1) compressing/resizing images is going to be the most effective.

2) apache already comes with mod_deflate which is a very effective HTML content compressor - but this works (and others) are only really useful on html/js/php content that can be compressed - not images.

3) the page might expire, but the image is still a seperate HTTP request - there's not large quantities of time spent loading HTML.

4) this might have a small improvement - but if the load average of the system is not high, then the cause is likely to be elsewhere - like big images.

Thanks. Im gathering all the great feedback from several people and once I hire someone, We will address a lot of these issues.

I know that my website isnt dial up friendly because of all the images I use but I cant have everything. I do get alot of people complimenting how good it looks and we get quite a few orders as a result. There are the few that do complain how its slow.
My priority is the graphics. But I do have to look at how best to optimize the performance by tweaking the the settings at Linode, maybe some coding on the pages and most important, resizing the images.

Jon
frenchgeneral.com

Why not offload the images entirely to Amazon S3 etc

Amazon S3. Thanks, Ill put that on my list. Dont know what it is. Everybody reading must think im in the wrong place but its better than craigslist. The feedback has been great - thanks

Jon
frenchgeneral.com

Its not difficult at all. All you are doing is offloading heavy files to S3. From where you will stream or distribute them back onto your site.

amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is storage service that amazon runs/offers - http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ - an advantage that it offers is that it has many geographically and network diverse servers, to enable the content to be closer to the end user, and allowing somewhat quicker loading times.

In terms of what it takes - slightly more complex content management than on the single website, and money to pay for it - pay be GB of bandwidth used and for the storage.

it's not going to make any real difference to loading times if the content is still too big - the bandwidth at Linode is pretty good in my use of it so far.

Linode does not run a CDN service. And its better to offload static content. However, one does have to optimize filesize