Hi,

I'm experiencing a strange problem that I'm wondering if anyone has an answer to.... When I am surfing my new site as an anonymous user, it is SO slow it's almost unusable... but when I log in as an authenticated user, or as myself (the administrator) the speed picks right up! Is there some query somewhere that is run when an anonymous user is on the site that could be timing out or taking a long time that doesn't get run with an authenticated user, or something???

Thanks in advance for any suggestions...

Comments

siobahn’s picture

As a followup - if I enable "administer nodes" for anonymous users, the performance increases (of course, I don't want to keep this checked ultimately!) - so it seems like that has something to do with it - as soon as I uncheck "administer nodes" it goes back to being like a 3600 baud 15-year-old dialup connection ;)

Anyone?

andremolnar’s picture

As you well know there are dozens of factors that can impact on the performance of a site.

From what I understand, the page caching mechanism in drupal does not cache pages for anonymous users. Meaning that every page is required to run all queries when the pages is requested. When you are logged in the results of many queries are cached, and you get faster page loads.

However, given even a modest set of hardware running a drupal site, you shouldn't be experiencing the sort of slow performance you describe.

Do you have a link to the site? What version are you running? Which database? Is the database on the same machine? What platform is the site on? Do you include a lot of custom code, components, modules etc?

Steven’s picture

From what I understand, the page caching mechanism in drupal does not cache pages for anonymous users. Meaning that every page is required to run all queries when the pages is requested. When you are logged in the results of many queries are cached, and you get faster page loads.

The page cache /only/ works for anonymous users.

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If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

andremolnar’s picture

Colour my face red. It was late - pretend I never said that ;-)

siobahn’s picture

Ok, I've pared down my site to bare bones and the speed problem seems to be resolved, but now I have another problem - my anonymous users, or users without administrative access, can't see any of my content!!!! (All they get is the generic Drupal welcome page) - Now, if I enable "administer nodes" in the user settings for my anonymous users, they can see now see the content, but obviously I don't want to do that permanently- I just want them to be able to SEE the content....I've tried every setting I can think of, but now I just feel stuck. Why would it be that I would need to go all the way out to enabling administration in order to just SEE the nodes?

Where am I going wrong??

Any suggestions would be received with an enormous amount of gratefulness...

media girl’s picture

Node Module -> "access content"

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mediagirl.org

sepeck’s picture

administer \ users
Configure tab \ permissions

give anonymous users acces.
also consider setting up roles for other types of access.

-sp
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Test site...always start with a test site.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

siobahn’s picture

"Access content" ALWAYS was checked - I even unchecked and rechecked it to be sure - still, no content! Nothing....

Any other tricks up your sleeve????

sepeck’s picture

Well, heck. Umm, clear the cache? It sounds like your permissions are all out of whack. Have you tried creating a new role and setting permissions for it to see if those new permissions work? If that does it, I am not sure how you would go about clearing up the anonymous users permissions. Setup a clean site and checking the permissions table in it to see the similarities?

-sp
---------
Test site...always start with a test site.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

kaparo’s picture

Exactly same problem I'm experiencing now. Cleared cache, sessions tables ... does not help. Just upgraded to 4.6.6 but no help too. Disabled cache and the site is no accessible at all. I stuck with reading tons of threads for optimizations, caching and stuff ...

Any suggestions? The last solution might be setting up a new site with exported nodes/comments/forums content and reimported again ... I'm not sure if this will work out the issue.

bwynants’s picture

what is in your node_access table?

kaparo’s picture

it does have what should be there (I already read the thread about node_access)

nid gid realm grant_view grant_update grant_delete
0, 0, all, 1, 0, 0

kaparo’s picture

more details about the problem can be found here, in this new thread