CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptjqueryajax
user2276673
user2276673

Reputation: 41

Why is my Ajax request significantly slower than a normal browser request?

I have created a website for a friend. Because he wished to have a music player continue to play music through page loads, I decided to load content into the page via ajax (facilitated by jQuery). It works fine, it falls back nicely when there is no javascript, and the back/forward buttons are working great, but it's dreadfully slow on the server.

A couple points:

  1. The initial page load is fairly quick. The Chrome developer console tells me that "index.php" loads in about 2.5 seconds. I have it set up so that query string params dictate which page is loaded, and this time frame is approximately accurate for them all. For the homepage, there is 8.4KB of data loaded.

  2. When I load the content in via an ajax request, no matter the size of the data downloaded, it takes approximately 20 seconds. The smallest amount of data that is loaded in this way is about 500 bytes. There is obviously a mismatch here.

So Chrome tells me that the vast majority of the time spent is "waiting" which I take to mean that the server is dealing with the request. So, that can only mean, I guess, that either my code is taking a long time, or something screwy is going on with the server. I don't think it's my code, because it's fairly minimal:

$file = "";
if (isset($_GET['page'])) {
    $file = $_GET['page'];
} else if (isset($_POST['page'])) {
    $file = $_POST['page'];
} else {
    $file = "home";
}

$file = 'content/' . $file . '.php';

if (file_exists($file)) {
    include_once($file);
} else {
    include_once('content/404.php');
}

This is in a content_loader.php file which my javascript (in this scenario) sends a GET request to along with a "page" parameter. HTML markup is returned and put into a DIV on the page.

I'm using the jQuery .get() shorthand function, so I don't imagine I could be messing anything up there, and I'm confident it's not a Javascript problem because the delay is in waiting for the data from the server. And again, even when the data is very small, it takes about 20 seconds.

I currently believe it's a problem with the server, but I don't understand why a request made through javascript would be so much slower than a request made the traditional way through the browser. As an additional note, some of the content pages do connect to a MySQL database, but some do not. It doesn't seem to matter what the page requires for processing or how much data it consists of, it takes right around 20 seconds.

I'm at a loss... does anyone know of anything that might explain this? Also, I apologize if this is not the correct place for such a question, none of the other venues seemed particularly well suited for the question either.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 6029

Answers (1)

Justin Warkentin
Justin Warkentin

Reputation: 10241

As I mentioned in my comment, a definite possibility could be reverse DNS lookups. I've had this problem before and I bet it's the source of your slow requests. There are certain Apache config directives you need to watch out for in both regular apache and vhost configs as well as .htaccess. Here are some links that should hopefully help:

http://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2011/04/reverse_dns_lookups_and_apache/

http://betabug.ch/blogs/ch-athens/933

To find more resources just Google something like "apache slow reverse dns".

A very little explanation

In a reverse DNS lookup an attempt is made to resolve an IP address to a hostname. Most of the time with services like Apache, SSH and MySQL this is unnecessary and it's a bad idea as it only serves to slow down requests/connections. It's good to look for configuration settings for your different services and disable reverse DNS lookups if they aren't needed.

In Apache there are certain configuration settings that cause a reverse lookup to occur. Things like HostnameLookups and allow/deny rules specifying domains instead of IP addresses. See the links above for more info.

As you suggested in your comment, the PHP script is executing quickly once it finally runs. The time is spent waiting on Apache - most likely to do a reverse DNS lookup, and failing. You know the problem isn't with your code, it's with the other services involved in the request.

Hope this helps!

Upvotes: 1

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