Some performance suggestions(?)

rjp2525 · September 9, 2015

Some serious page loading issues can be noted on the gallery pages especially, presumably because of the number of images being loaded all at once. For one thing, why are the albums stuck up at the top of the page? I prefer to browse the newly added screenshots and gallery content so it gets relatively annoying having to scroll half way down the page to get there. (not to mention the added overhead of having to download all those thumbnails as well)

Wouldn't it be a better idea to lazy load the images to reduce the page load times? Not sure how possible that is since I generally don't use any of this prebuilt software like IPB so that brings up another question.. Why not use a custom built software for the website? I'm sure the few web developers (myself included) would be glad to contribute to it, there would be an unlimited number of possibilities with it. The old LCPDFR used to send arrest and other statistics once an hour to the site but I've had some cool ideas about having LSPDFR actually being able to write tickets then have them available on your profile for other officers to see. Huge idea, but very possible!

On a side note... does that "X-DDoSProtection-Mitigation" header actually do anything? Seems no matter what, a ddos attack ALWAYS brings down LCPDFR's website - I'll be straight up honest here, OVH is not the provider if you're looking for reliable uptime. A third party ddos protection company might have better results than the Nginx proxy you have setup.

No, this is not a rage thread as much as it may sound like it.. Just getting sick of the 3-5 second gallery page load times, terrible gallery layout and the overall uptime with the current hosting provider that G17 uses.

Cyan · September 9, 2015

Some serious page loading issues can be noted on the gallery pages especially, presumably because of the number of images being loaded all at once. For one thing, why are the albums stuck up at the top of the page? I prefer to browse the newly added screenshots and gallery content so it gets relatively annoying having to scroll half way down the page to get there. (not to mention the added overhead of having to download all those thumbnails as well)
Wouldn't it be a better idea to lazy load the images to reduce the page load times? Not sure how possible that is since I generally don't use any of this prebuilt software like IPB so that brings up another question.. Why not use a custom built software for the website? I'm sure the few web developers (myself included) would be glad to contribute to it, there would be an unlimited number of possibilities with it. The old LCPDFR used to send arrest and other statistics once an hour to the site but I've had some cool ideas about having LSPDFR actually being able to write tickets then have them available on your profile for other officers to see. Huge idea, but very possible!
On a side note... does that "X-DDoSProtection-Mitigation" header actually do anything? Seems no matter what, a ddos attack ALWAYS brings down LCPDFR's website - I'll be straight up honest here, OVH is not the provider if you're looking for reliable uptime. A third party ddos protection company might have better results than the Nginx proxy you have setup.

No, this is not a rage thread as much as it may sound like it.. Just getting sick of the 3-5 second gallery page load times, terrible gallery layout and the overall uptime with the current hosting provider that G17 uses.

Because we like the images at the top of the page and our users like them. If you don't, feel free to block them with an element rule.

All of the management team actually work, proper jobs, seperate from this site. So such pipe dreams like custom built software isn't really suitable for us. IPS is a pre-built community software, if we have any issues we open an issue with them. To replicate IPS' functionality in full would probably take me at least 6-12 months of development time. However, some lacking parts of the site are custom built, such as our new downloads portal. If you do it -- please make sure to let me know! We'd probably switch to a decent 100% open source solution in an instant!

LCPDFR was online, so it made sense for it to send statistics online. LSPDFR is enforced offline, so it doesn't make too much sense to send similar data to our servers. We do have some plans for features, but that isn't for discussion here.

I'm not going to discuss our DDoS protection policy or system with you, all I'm going to say is we're limited in both money and time. Our custom nginx modules mitigate around ~80% of layer 7 attacks, our network provider mitigates all of the layer 4 attacks. When we go down, it's usually due to a custom layer 7 attack we've not accounted for in our own rules. And we are not hosted with OVH -- they simply provide our frontend proxy. You don't see what I see every day, this site suffers constant attacks in an attempt to take it down. Almost all of these are blocked by predefinied rules.

No, this is not a rage reply as much as it may sound like it.. I'm just getting sick and tired of people critizing our setup and doing nothing to help. I mean, it's a free service. If you really want to help, hit the donate button at the top of the site or create the custom software you're talking about.

AlconH · September 11, 2015

No, this is not a rage thread as much as it may sound like it.. Just getting sick of the 3-5 second gallery page load times, terrible gallery layout and the overall uptime with the current hosting provider that G17 uses.

Dude. I'm stoned as fuck and you're still managing to piss me off....

Full stack developer my ass. If you don't have the logic in you to contemplate how much G17 Media manages to do with a limited budget, then you really aren't going to succeed in the IT industry once you graduate from comp sci. The guys here do a really fucking impressive job over here. You should learn to appreciate the rare things in life that come for free, especially when they're this god damn good.

Don't like the loading times here? Then feel free to piss off back to Instagram.