Freesound Forums
Why is Freesound so slow?
Started August 27th, 2024 · 21 replies · Latest reply by kevp888 4 days, 13 hours ago
Freesound has gotten slower since the new rebrand. Can somebody actually bother to get rid of all the unnecessary bloated code that's riddled within this website's HTML so I can have a more fluent experience? I've wanted to ask this because I've noticed the absolute beef of latency that's current in this site before.
P.S, please don't delete this. I just need improvement.
Hi,
Sometimes there are server slowdowns which make the site less responsive, but Freesound is generally quite fast. Freesound development happens at a public university, and we unfortunately don't have resources to optimise every bit of the code. We do our best to make it fast and responsive and will continue to do so 
the freesound team
nchnvraudio wrote:
Freesound has gotten slower
If there are specific areas of freesound that are slow, please tell us which.
If you have the time, you can use for example the free trial of pingdom to track one example of the pages you have speed issues with for 2-4 weeks and share a report of the result here, so that it might help focus developing optimizations one day.
sabrinawitch wrote:
It's not slow.It's not even bloated.
What are you talking about? I click the "Sounds" button on the website and it takes 10 seconds to pull up the page. When you load up the website after a lot of time the UI builds up like it's got too much to work with.
If you're telling me that it's only happening on my end then you must have different connection speed on whatever routers you have.
nchnvraudio wrote:
I click the "Sounds" button on the website and it takes 10 seconds to pull up the page. [...] If you're telling me that it's only happening on my end then you must have different connection speed on whatever routers you have.
"Sounds" ( https://freesound.org/browse/ which redirects to https://freesound.org/search/?s=Date+added+(newest+first)&g=1 ) just took me 8 seconds to load. I agree that that page is usually quite slow, especially compared to the relatively decent homepage (around 1-2 seconds to load).
A first test via the previously mentioned site's trial function shows for the browse page:
Australia 9.24 s
Eastern Asia 9.01 s
Eastern US 6.63 s
Europe 6.69 s
Western US 7.42 s
While for the main page I see:
Australia 4.81 s
Eastern Asia 4.32 s
Eastern US 2.02 s
Europe 1.48 s
Western US 2.91 s
qubodup wrote:A first test via the previously mentioned site's trial function shows for the browse page:
Australia 9.24 s
Eastern Asia 9.01 s
Eastern US 6.63 s
Europe 6.69 s
Western US 7.42 s
I'm telling you, that is some slow loading time.
Hi,
Last days Freesound has been a bit slower due to some server issues, but normally Freesound runs at fine speeds. The new UI might be a bit slower because there's some more browser code involved (and more information displayed), but it should not be very significant. When Freesound feels slow, is mostly due to problems/limitations in the backend.
the freesound team
user of over 13 years, i love this site. it has definitely gotten slightly slower for me the past couple years and much moreso the last couple months. i also am having issues constantly when trying to load large files or many files, which im trying to do often. my internet is solid and so are my devices. but once again, i love this site
keep it going yall, its truly one of the last free virtuous creative platforms to have access to, i feel a sense of wellness being connected with a buncha people who also spend countless hours sifting and gifting audio snippets (even when its slowwww )
Hi,
Yes Freesound has been particularly slow in the past weeks. We are aware of that but have not had the time to fix it properly. Freesound runs on a complex university infrastructure of which we don’t have full control, and sometimes we can’t do as much as we would like to. We’ll look into fixing this as soon as possible.
In the last years Freesound speed has increased a lot, and what you are experiencing these days is not the norm. Also you have to take into account that it gets more complex to keep it fast the more the database grows, and it grows every day! We have vert limited resources, both in terms of infrastructure and human resources, so we do our best!
Thanks for your understanding
the freesound team
Hello Frederic,
Thank you (and the FS team) very much for your effort and for the time you spend to improve Freesound constantly !
No doubt that you’re doing your best to solve the problems, and as many users I suppose, I wish you could solve them as expected.
Love this wonderful website ! 
Wishing you all the best !
Kevin
Hello frederic,
What ever happens I am glad being a part of this environment. Even there are some problems sometimes.
Thank you.
I love this site.
And use it for my editing. And encourage my film students to do the same.
But today, I am staggered at the loading speed of each page, and the inability to download sounds because of '504 Gateway time-out'. I was with a client and it was impossible to explore and spot sounds because of the malfunctioning site. It was embarrassing.
When will these issues be fixed? Because they are seriously bad.
Look forward to you fixing things and restoring Freesound to its usual greatness.
Cheers,
neil
Hi,
Let me share some more information with you. As of today, our monitoring shows that with the latest changes we introduced in the last week(s) Freesound is generay very fast. Nevertheless, there are particular moments in which it starts misbehaving and becomes slow, sometimes unusable at all. These slowdons can last for 15-20 minutes, and have been happening at a rate of 1 slowdown every 2 days approximately. We are investigating how to eliminate the slowdowns, but we have very limited resources so it is not easy.
Another thing that we will be working on in the near future is in optimizing our seaech engine so the search page becomes faster.
In any case, the experience using Freesound these days should be very positive, except when trying to access Freesound during a slowdown.
That's it for now, thanks for your understanding!
the freesound team