Site very slow after upgrade to VB/VBA 3.7 - Firebug help

[RobParker]

I upgraded both VB and VBA yesterday and my site has gone really slow and the server load has shot up.

I've posted this on VB.com but thought if it's a VBA issue I might get some help here.

I used firebug to try and analyse for slow loading sections, etc and one thing that stands out is all of the pages seems to load twice.

Is this normal in firebug? It didn't happen on my test installation so I'm not really sure.

I've put images below of what firebug is showing me, I've linked them for size.

VBAdvanced Homepage - http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/8026/indexly6.png
Forumhome Index - http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/600/forumhomelk0.png
Forumdisplay - http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/4959/forumdisplaywt6.png

We have changed to a new style as well so it could be partly related to that but I don't think that explains the double loading.

Any help would be great as I'm stumped as to why things have gone so slow. All I can think of is because none of our users have anything cached any more as we changed theme, they're all needing to download our images etc for the first time but I'm not sure if that explains it.

[KW802]

Have you tried using the default vB style?

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[RobParker]

It only happened on our new skin and I think I've managed to solve it.

Here's my message to the skin developer.


I've been having a really strange problem and I think I've (at least partially) resolved it now so thought I should let you know.

As our server load was already quite high we disabled avatars on our forums.

I then upgraded to the latest version of VB and changed over to using this skin (with a few of our own modifications such, changing the image colours, etc).

Once upgraded, our server load shot extremely high using this skin. When we changed back to our old skin it went back down again.

I installed Firebug for Firefox to try and analyse the page loading speeds and found something really strange.

Every single php page (index.php, showthread.php, newthread.php, etc) would load twice according to Firebug. It would take abount a second to load index.php for example but then after it had finished loading the images,etc it would then take another few second to load index.php again.

This only happened on this skin.

After spending ages trying to get to the cause of it I found that because in the header the skin displays your avatar, if avatars have been disabled it seems to cause this problem. I tested it by adding and removing the code and it's definitely the cause but I don't have a clue why.

The code I removed from my header was:

<a href="profile.php?$session[sessionurl]do=editavatar"><img src="$navbar_ava[0]" alt="Your avatar" border="0" style="float:left;margin-right:7px;" /></a>

Once I removed this my server load dropped right back down and now Firebug is only showing one GET on the php pages instead of two.

I hope that helps anyone who's having similar problems.