I'm happy to say that Jappleng is stable again. Not only is it
stable but it is considerably much faster!
OPTIMIZING (Speed
Boost!)
When the new entertainment (Anime & Manga) and the Jappleng
dictionary sections were added, Jappleng had gone from being
moderately quick to load each page to a crawl. It was over 4.6
seconds per page, minimum! Yikes! Well, now it's less than 0.2 -
0.5 seconds to load a page. This means with 100 users it will take
2 seconds per page assuming everyone were to load the site at the
same time, in theory at least. This is considerably faster than
most websites.
I have taken the opportunity to further optimize the database
and queries and I have also removed the randomization portion of
the dictionary as that feature only did more harm than good.
I have also banned over 1,000 ip addresses which were
maliciously trying to scrape data and also try to exploit the site.
This will continue to be an ongoing effort and various methods to
ban users will be employed. Software is being used to monitor and
prevent access to the site as well.
I have compressed the javascript and css files so that they
require much less bandwidth. I believe it was around 400kb of data
that was saved!
Images and other content now have a better cache policy, images
for example have a policy set to 3 months rather than 2 hours.
I audited and fine-tuned the server configurations so that the
idle CPU usage went from 80%~ to 0-3%!
I have begun to add lazy loading to large groups of images so
that they're not downloaded as a priority but once the page loads,
they will begin to download. This is going to be a big
improvement for you and the server overall.
Overall, after you load Jappleng the first time, it will be
practically instant for other pages.
BUG FIX
As previously announced, there was a very large list of bugs
that appeared after the previous mainteance due to the server
upgrade and jQuery being updated from 1.7 to 3.7.8. This required
an extensive amount of changes but the improvments not only made
the website much faster to use on all platforms but it also
improved security as well.
However, some bugs still remain and I will be tackling the few
that remain very soon.
MOBILE
SUPPORT
I wanted to take this opportunity to mention that my next goal
is to add mobile compatibility to the site before adding new
features.
I hope you are all very excited about these changes! I know it
was a bit painful to bare with the ups and downs but it's
functional now and blazing fast! Tell your friends, Jappleng is
going to be awesome!
