Question

I tested PQA with pingdom and Gtmetrix after disabling PVS plugin.

The site was very slow and loaded in average of 60seconds

The reason was mainly due to pqa trying to load user avaters

Some reasons why the site was very slow included;

osslessly compressing http://example.com/qa-theme/Base/images/ico.png could save 535B (28% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=14608399640701454626&qa_size=50 could save 432B (16% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=8309824641205257442&qa_size=50 could save 414B (32% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=12543852386913547020&qa_size=50 could save 409B (26% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=13070423788141188728&qa_size=50 could save 406B (17% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=8685091495804949940&qa_size=50 could save 404B (18% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=13239963118545430749&qa_size=50 could save 398B (21% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=1087990015309709653&qa_size=50 could save 397B (18% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=17314875727365912245&qa_size=50 could save 397B (18% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=11952843843306638902&qa_size=50 could save 387B (34% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=4594582247023788535&qa_size=50 could save 387B (34% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=17108486273420520734&qa_size=50 could save 382B (17% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=7961938026240220132&qa_size=50 could save 381B (20% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=3611767108367301948&qa_size=50 could save 375B (18% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=17299768113798948836&qa_size=50 could save 372B (21% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=14944573820460406526&qa_size=50 could save 371B (25% reduction). See optimized version
Losslessly compressing http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=6476686660480341839&qa_size=50 could save 365B (20% reduction). See optimized version

The following resources are missing a cache validator. Resources that do not specify a cache validator cannot be refreshed efficiently. Specify a Last-Modified or ETag header to enable cache validation for the following resources:

    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=1087990015309709653&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=11952843843306638902&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=12543852386913547020&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=13070423788141188728&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=13239963118545430749&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=14608399640701454626&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=14944573820460406526&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=17108486273420520734&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=17299768113798948836&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=17314875727365912245&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=3611767108367301948&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=4594582247023788535&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=6476686660480341839&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=7961938026240220132&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=8309824641205257442&qa_size=50
    http://example.com/?qa=image&qa_blobid=8685091495804949940&qa_size=50

I also noticed the server load increased from 1.0 to about 10.04

How do we fix this?

Can we disbale loading user avater entirely?

Comments

I have spent some time on this issue.
By editing qa-theme.php of base theme mostly to remove the user avatars from appearing in thread lists, I was able to reduce the speed to 6seconds.
I will remove all instances of user avatars from appearing in both thread and replies.
Ideally any website should load in less than 3 seconds.
By customizing further, the test site now loads in 3 seconds.

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What about the performance of the Q2A is under the same conditions?

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In addition, what about load time in development tool of your browser?

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Mostly Q2A performance was very poor which caused me to switch from Apache web server to litespeed web server. After installing pqa on the light speed, I switched to Apache and it work worked very well. On the Apache server, q2a load averages was 86.04 to 101.6 while PQA load averages was between 10.04 to 13.6.
PQA outperformed Q2A.
What was slowing the site down was avatar images which I had to remove from the thread lists

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Total load time for PQA in my dev tools is 8742ms ~ 8.742 seconds  for all scripts to fully execute on all pages of pqa. This test sites also get about 5000 unique visitors per day and the sever is a minimal vps server

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There may be a need to separately evaluate the server's own performance. I am operationg some of PQA site on "dedicated" server. Performance of those sites is less than 1 or 2 seconds. Since the principle of VPS is same as shared server, its performance is no good. In addition, you may need to make sure that avatar is read from the cache.

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Yes VPS sucks thats why I am glad that PQA even loads fast on it. I will test on a dedicated server too.

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References:
https://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/threads/litespeed-cache-settings.5673/
https://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/threads/litespeed-configuration-for-high-traffic-web.6528/
http://www.litespeedtech.com/docs/webserver/config/tuning