How can I figure out what's slowing down my site?

[AndreasGalster]

I want to launch an MVP for my site soon but I have the problem that it’s loading quite slow and I am not sure what is causing the issue.

http://pigmentsbeta.meteor.com/landing

Pingdom Tools

If you look at the amount of requests and data that’s being loaded that’s not really a lot in my opinion. According to Opera (gathered at a recent meetup talking to the CEO) the average page size is 2MB so I should be well in the range of file size for a page.

If I look at the network timings in Chrome it is loading quite slow but I don’t know why. I am using Polymer and a lot of webcomponents (although on that particular site not a lot of them are being executed at once). I am not sure how I can figure out what is slowing down the site. Is it something with how resources get loaded or is it how certain stuff is being parsed by the browser?

How can I investigate these issues?

[Steve]

The first thing I can see is that you load static assets from your meteor server. This is very slow. See here, for example:

First Visit Loads are Ridiculously Slow

Ever since one of the last few new versions of Meteor.JS, my application is ridiculously slow for first time visitors. I’m talking 10 to 20+ seconds for first time loads. However after I visit the application, all loads are fast and normal, even if I hit the refresh button. But once I clear cache and refresh again, first load is ridiculously slow again. Why is this happening? And what can I do to improve the first visit load time?

[AndreasGalster]

Thanks, I’ll try to move everything to AWS. Is there another good solution for serving very small static files? I really want to use my free AWS quota as much as possible for the bigger files that get uploaded and downloaded by the site users).

[AndreasGalster]

Hmm, serving aws static files didn’t really change anything. The first load is still surprisingly slow. It also can’t be pubs/subs because as of now (fresh deploy) there’s nothing in the database. I’ll be removing web components now to see if it’s polymer slowing things down.

[Steve]

If I were you, I would remove my links to static files to see if this is the cause of the problem. If it is, I would check that AWS is correctly configured for serving static files. If it is not, I would first move my app to a true hosting service (such as DigitalOcean). Given meteor.com erratic performance, I would not trust any measurement on it.

[muaddib]

1. On my fiber connection the site is fast, on mobile the site is slow. There is a 1 mb image that I bet can be compressed. 1 mb images are too much, I skimmed it to 200kb without noticing any change.

2. If you cant reduce site size (which is not that big actually) consider a premium hosting solution

3. remember pingdom doesn’t execute JS so you get a wrong picture. Use chrome dev tools for reference.