My site took 1.76 seconds per page. Nothing was broken — the code was just an ocean away from the database.
This one is mine, on this site, the day before it went live on its own domain. I'm posting it because the whole premise here is that the failures are worth more than the wins, and it would be strange to ask that of everyone else and never do it myself. I'm not a developer. I built this site by directing an AI assistant, and by the time it went live everything worked — pages loaded, accounts worked, nothing errored. It just felt heavy. So I timed it: 1.76 seconds for a page that should take a quarter of a second. My first instinct was that something in the code was slow, and that instinct was completely wrong. The code was fine. What had happened is that the two halves of the site had ended up on different continents. The database — where all the posts and accounts live — sits in Ireland, because that's where I put it. The servers running the site had been placed in Washington by default, because that's what the hosting platform does when you don't say otherwise. Nobody chose that. It was just the default, and I didn't know there was a choice to make. So every single page was crossing the Atlantic and back, several times over, because a page asks the database several separate questions before it can be drawn. The fix was a three-line configuration file naming Dublin instead. Same code, same database, nothing rewritten. Pages went from 1.76 seconds to about a quarter of a second. The reason I think this is worth posting: no amount of asking an AI to 'make this page faster' would have found it, because nothing in the code was slow. And nothing ever showed up as an error. It looked like it was working, and it was working — just badly, in a way that only shows up if you actually measure.