Money back

Hello,

I have just purchased the Sporter-template, but it is too slow to load (8-15 seconds) and also problems in Chrome. I am sorry to say that I do not have the time to troubleshoot this and I have to move on to another template-provider.

I just want a template that works right away.

How do I get my money back?

Thank you in advance!

Url to your website please.

www.hockeynorge.no - but it is in offline mode, I don not want to have this site online yet.

I can give you the login-info if you give me your adress.

Please send it to [email protected].

just a moment, and here I can see that you don't have the information about building sites time cargo hold oneself sides not only depends from joomla! I would advise you to check parameters of your server. I in the sequence of a few minutes optimized joomla exactly with the convention sporter and started in the time himself 0.8 - 1.5 of seconds! But in my opinion the guilt lies on the side of your server, because it can be burdened too firmly alone concerns the connection on which a server is standing, and of Internet connection which you have at home. And give me the name of this tool with which you inspected it

Sporter template works really well also with chrome!!! If you have problem with loading time you should first check your web server. Are you using a shared hosting or dedicated web server?

Template loads very quickly, the problem with loading is connected with content which is delivered with Quickstart package. It is a portal site and it includes a lot of image files. Below charts illustrate weight and time of loading individual files.

Ok, thank you Gavick. So the solution is to delete all those images?

Then it is the Chrome-issue, is this as easy to fix?

Image.jpg

I don't know why this way at you he is, specially I installed the browser chrome and at me everything is the way it is necessary. An image is confirming it below.



At loading of the packet to the server some of files of the module was probably damaged. And whether by chance you don't have Chrome in version 9?

[attachment]C:fakepathImageAfterMatchNews.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment]C:fakepathImageTopRated.jpg[/attachment]

Tank you Najx

I have just ïnstalled Chrome 9.

I don't have problem regarding viewing the "After Match News", but when I try to switch over to "Top Rated" the pictures andt text in the module is all wrong.

Hi

Can I please see Your site ?

I have sent you an email

Thank you!

this site provides you "templates"... which basically means you are the one who has to work around the files and other things to costumize it. The problems that you have mentioned are far away from any "guarantee" what you might be expect here. Not to mention the fact that there is no warranty for these products. Everyone uses them for their own risk. If you have any difficulties regarding the costumization or other things you can ask them on this forum. Otherwise, it is odd to ask for money back. Building a website is a long and complex method. You should have considered that before you made your payment for this template.

Dear Gavick,

What is the name of this Firefox add on?

Hi

I have no idea, but YSlow got a similar tool.

Firebug

Dear Gavick,

What is the name of this Firefox add on?

Firebug

I second the magorr opinion above. Gavick or any other template house provides "templates" and customization work reside on your shoulder. Although sometimes moderators and support guys give you some hints to achieve a specific need , you need to do your own research and get your eyes into the code.
It's like buying a car: dealer won't paint the car in your "candy pink" color, won't install your custom rims without you paing for this custom service. Your template is a "stock configuration" item .. if you want "customization" get yourself into the code or hire somebody for it.
I spent countless nights unslept to shape this beautifull template to my need.


With some optimization (vital for any kind of portal, sporter based or not), images/java/css compression,cache joomla cache and server-side cache, Sporter can load pretty fast.


PS: Sorry for double-post.

teitbite, hgabc,

Thank you:)
I apologize short reply....
I am not good at English:(

Hi

@hgabc thanks. The example with the car is great Maby someone will understand better what template clubs are for. We are selling tools to make a site, not making a sites.

I would give you a +1 for this, but you've already got 64.. so, thumbs up!

Can't agree more.

Hi

Thank You. Good to know someone understand Us

I've also been running into these 30-40 second load times. The problem seems to be that the front page of this template uses several instances of mod_news_pro_gk4, and each of those instances are loading several images. There are limited solutions to this problem.

We could delete the images that are being loaded up, but then, what's the point in having the module if there are no images associated with it?

We could delete the modules themselves, but then we'd have to build something else to go in it's place, and in that case, what's the point in buying the template?

Or we could make a splash page with a "pre-loading images/content" message, but that is so passe, and very 1999.

If there is another option, my mind hasn't come up with it. It's a big enough problem that I've put the site on hold for a few days while I try to decide if I need to scrap the template entirely or if there is a reasonable solution.

In the future, please do not design templates that are so heavily reliant on this module, because it really does cause issues in how long it takes a site to load. As you said earlier in the thread, this is a template for a portal. The trouble is, if it takes 40 seconds to load a page with a small amount of demo content, how long will it take to load with an active portal that has a lot of content? My guess is that it will turn into a nightmare if an adequate solution to this issue is not put in place from the start.

In some point I agree with you; however, the loading time also depends on the method you're using to define the thumbnails for different modules, your caching options and finally (but not least importantly) the scripts execution upon loading.

Gavick templates are working fine after customization. If you take your time and check out or delete things that you are not using, that would really effect your loading time. Also, using lower quality thumbnails would also help you. As an example, the editors on my website are recommended to pre-design all the images they're using for the modules on the front page for exactly the same resolution what the image is going to be appear.

Another very significant factor is your service provider and geographical location. Don't host website for Canadians from New Zealand and if you are aware of the high traffic, you should rent more advanced servers. That's basically it.

That is just my personal opinion base don my own experiences.

I don't suppose you would know anything about this 1969 expiration date would you? I don't know if that would even be a contributing factor or not, but it seems like something I should definitely repair.

sporter-cache.png

Wow! Could be some CMS error or misplaced attributes. You're right, I have no idea where it came from, but if i were you, i would purge everything which is entitled as "cache" xD

I don't think so this thing actually stalls the site tho.

One other thing I've been unclear on it whether the number of categories in K2 makes a difference as well. I have a large number of categories..rephrase...a LARGE number of categories, but I'm not sure that it has anything to do with load time.

I think that might have been the silver bullet. I went into admin control panel, went under tools and clicked to delete all expired cache. After that I tried the site again. My page loads much faster now.

I do still have to figure out what is causing me to have the 1969 expiration date, but as long as I keep deleting them they won't slow me down. Or maybe set up a cron to delete them.

Happy that helped you! About the categories... it's never been a good idea to keep a huge database on your server. As an example, if some of your editors are messing around with the categories panel, it slows down the page because the server is busy with your back-end rather than serve the front-end. If you put high load on your database, that would effect the performance as well.

I still haven't had an opportunity to properly investigate why I'm generating the weird expiration date, but I at least found an easy way of using cron to automatically purge the expired cache files.

http://hartlessbydesign.com/blog/view/1 ... ired-cache

I'm at a total loss as to why this cache is expiring in 1969. I don't even understand how the cache can work if the file is expired at the moment of creation.

About the only thing I have been able to determine with certainty is that it is a CMS issue that has nothing to do with Gavick. I've checked this on several Joomla templates from different vendors and they all give me the same expiration date. Weird.

Ok, so I've spent many, many hours researching & testing this performance/load time issue. What I've come to learn is that the load time is a direct reflection of how many categories are created.

I find it a little confusing to tell you the truth. Even if the categories are referenced in their own menus (not in main menu) and are not referenced on the front page at all, they still drag down the load time. In fact, I can create the categories and have no menu item pointing to them, and they still drag down the performance. As of this moment, on a fresh install, I have a 95k load that takes 30 seconds. If I delete the categories (which aren't even in use yet) it drops to 12 seconds. I can't make any sense of that at all.

So basically, if I want to make a site that covers news for 100 professional sports teams, then I have to accept that the page is going to take over a minute to load. Caching is not a solution to this for several reasons:

1. News updated constantly throughout the day will never show up as it is posted.

2. All of the hit counters will be wrong

3. Some percentage of the people will be presented with a non-cached page that still takes the full load time to render the page.

There's a lot of other down sides to using caching as a solution, but those are the ones that bother me.

I'm also kind of wondering if this may be an issue with K2. I've made plenty of Joomla sites with the old Section>Category format that have more categories than this and do not suffer these load times, so that just makes it seem that much more confusing to me.

Anyway, I know there isn't a real answer to this. I'm just posting my observations for anyone else who is searching the forum in the future to try to figure out why their site takes forever to load. At this point I'm thinking I may as well ditch the K2 template and go back to something that works better.

Anyone that cares to use a great free tool to test and help trouble shoot their site Pingdom is fantastic.

http://tools.pingdom.com/

Nice tool, thanks. That one clocks it a few seconds faster than Firebug, but still within the same general range.

I think I might go ahead and keep building out these menus and categories on one install just to see (out of curiosity) what the final load time ends up being. I wont be surprised if it's 5 minutes.

---

As I work on this, I am also seeing that adding menus seems to be increasing the load time. That is really strange because I am adding menus that are only used on specific internal pages, so I don't see why they would have any impact on how fast the front page loads. That just doesn't make sense to me so maybe it's some kind of weird coincidence, but I check the page load after each menu is created, and the front page is a few seconds slower with each iteration (despite the fact that the html response is still 95k). Honestly, that makes no sense to me at all.

Two major factors you need to take into account on your load times is the connection you have to the site. I can confirm that on my 50mbps connection that the site does load slow so we can rule that out. The other often overlooked reason for slow load times is a poor hosting company that either has you on an over sold server (this is true in most cases) or it is just a crappy server. In both cases you have a slum lord host and need to find a better one.

One option you have if you are serving up lots of images (which could also be a problem) is to use a tool like JA Amazon from Joomla Art (www.joomlart.com/joomla/extensions/ja-amazon-s3) and server your images from the Amazon S3 server. It is a very cheap solution and as an example I have a site that serves 189mb of images from Amazon S3 and it costs me about 8 cents US a month.

You make some good points there. I have considered that the issue could be (at least partially) related to the server that is hosting the files. I'm on a VPS package though, so in theory, I shouldn't have to be worried about it being overloaded. But really, I have no way of knowing who else is on the same machine or how many resources they are consuming. I've been considering just moving to some type of cloud server so that I don't have to worry about this.

I've never heard of that Amazon extension, but will definitely check it out. I would assume that calling images from a 2nd server would take longer than pulling them from the local server, but maybe I'm wrong about that. Definitely worth looking into, especially at those prices.

Let me start by saying that a VPS can and in many cases is more problematic than a shared server. A host can create multiple VPS accounts on a server and generally they do not monitor what sites these clients are hosting. Yes you have a dedicated amount of space but in all but a few cases you share the system RAM as well as a chunk of the hard drive and if the burst rates are not setup correctly or fairly (if they are used at all) that can cause serious problems. I had a VPS once where I was experiencing really poor lag and after some investigation I found that another client on that server hosting his own VPS was hosting a gaming platform. If you are dedicated to having a VPS then consider the added value of getting even a small dedicated server. You are going to be happier and will have full control over everything that is happening on that server and will know when and why something is going wrong.

As for hosting images on Amazon I will tell you this, your images will load so much faster and you can even select which server or server's your images host on. If you know where your target market is then regardless of where your server is in the world you can server your images from locations closer to your market than you are right now. Amazon is in the cloud and they do not run cheap servers like you will find in a low budget hosting environment. They have standards where if they have a server that is not running at the base load balance they will increase its resources so that it does.

Also you will find that you can host your clients sites on the Amazon cloud for much cheaper than you are paying at your hosting company or any other third party backup firm. For me it is the peace of mind I get knowing my backups are hosted on top notch systems with mass amounts of redundancy and that I will always have access to this data regardless of the disaster where my coalition server is or even at any given Amazon backup location. I currently backup over 400 websites to the tune of $9 US a month and that cost me $30 US before I found out about Amazon S3. The plus also is that this price is flexible and is metered based on my usage. So if I lose a client and remove their backup my monthly cost go down.

That's interesting. I think I'm going to sign up for a shared account with a different company and upload an identical copy of the site there to compare the load times. I'll also have to poke around in WHM later to see if there's a utility in there that can shed some light on the server speed as well.

Here's an example of what I'm seeing as I build out these pages. I just created 3 menus. In total, these three menus have 32 menu items, which are all basically pointing to a generic "coming soon" page. They are only set (in module manager) to be displayed on specific internal pages. None of them are displayed on the front page at all. Yet for some reason, it takes an additional 6 seconds to load the html for the front page. For the life of me I can't understand why something that doesn't appear on that page is effecting how long it takes for the page to load. I'm probably overlooking something, but at the moment, it just makes no sense to me at all.

I wonder if the same thing will happen if I skip making menus and just do a bullet list similar to how the "Categorys" section is done on the front page.

If you want email me at kevin AT nwidesigns DOT com and I can set you up with a test site on one of my servers. If it lags there then you can guarantee it is the site and not the server. I will set you up on my newest beast that runs like a raped ape looking for a mate!

haha. That is one hysterical way of wording it, and it is a very generous offer. Thank you. I may take you up on that. I think this is an example of where module caching could be very useful. Unfortunately, Joomla just gives me the option of selecting "Use Global" or "No Caching" for modules. I guess it's all or nothing where that's concerned.