Do things seem faster to you?

In the middle of last month, a helpful LiquidWeb employee converted allpar from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.2, and the site suddenly sped up dramatically - and server load went down.

About a week after that, I installed (after consulting with LiquidWeb) a few tweaks, and the site sped up again - and server load went down again. That turned out to be good given that we got a lot of traffic from the Chicago show.

The result finally showed up in Alexa’s rankings. Allpar has been listed as “very slow” - slower than 92% of sites with a home page load of 7 seconds. Now, averaged out for the entire month, Allpar is nearly twice as fast, and is just ranked as “slow.” We’re hoping for “fast” but our changes were made mid-month, so we’ll have to wait until the first week of February to see what Alexa thinks then.

If you know of another benchmarking site, it would be good to know - but Allpar sure seems faster to me.