Today I've noticed that our frontpage was taking more than 10 seconds to load. Which is by any means unacceptable. I fired up Firebug and had a look at the network tab. Everything seemed normal, except for the response from the server. The server was taking 10s to generate the first response. After that in just few ms all Javascript and CSS resources were loaded. Due to the fact that we haven't changed anything on the site lately & we also didn't have any traffic spikes what I immediately did was submit a ticket with our hosting provider.
In my ticket I explained what the problem was: "The frontpage is loading really slow, it takes more than 10s for it to load. Sub-pages seems to behave way better at around 2s.... Any ideas what could be wrong?"
After around 10mins I got a reply containing a link to a performance report on gmetrix, explaining to me that I have to look at yslow. If you have a performance grade of 91% on pagespeed and 81% on yslow, do you think that getting to 100% will help you improver your speed with 10s? Especially when the issue is not the serving of the resources, but the first response from the server?
Such kind of useless support just annoys me. No, it actually makes me angry for wasting my time to submit my ticket. This response shows just poor attitude toward the user.
After letting my disappointment with this reply pass, I started to think on my own. What could be wrong? Hm, why didn't I look first at the debug information that Joomla provides. I enabled the debug option in the global config (before that I made sure that the debug information will be shown only to super admin users), refreshed the page and had a look at what it had to say. Within 20s I had identified what was going on. Our twitter module was no longer working properly due to a twitter API change and it was hanging for 10s...
So, moral of the story? If you are user - do everything that comes to your mind to debug the issue on your own and if you can't figure it out - provide all that information to support.
If you are the one doing the support - think a little before replying! Is your reply going to help solve the issue your user is having, or is it copy/paste from your support script???
With all that said, I hope that you have positive experience with our support. If we failed with that - I'm really sorry. If you want to let us know what we could do better, just leave a comment bellow. I know from personal experience what it is to get bad support and don't want to do this to you :)