Site Load Time | Test Please

[tommylogic]

My site had been fairly slow to load. In part it was due to server response time, additional scripts, and a few other things I had going on.

I have made some changes and optimized MySQL... I'd like to know if anyone is still experiencing slow loads. Please let me know what your internet speed is as well, so I can make further adjustments.

Web Design | Speed Test

[Arkady]

15.8s over UK based (B.T. internet) 5.0M ADSL

[misterm]

8 seconds, using cable-dsl from the Netherlands.

It might also be a DNS-issue. What you could do is add a PHP-timing/loader script and write it to a log (most likely per day) and monitor it.
That way you will know if it is a server issue or some kind of DNS issue.

[tommylogic]

Yeah.. I have a debugging system in place. This is my report

Profile Information

Application afterLoad: 0.040 seconds
Application afterInitialise: 0.273 seconds
Application afterRoute: 0.313 seconds
Application afterDispatch: 0.625 seconds
Application afterRender: 1.734 seconds
Memory Usage

13836288

16 queries logged

(all were fine)

[Acuity]

when i clicked the web design link - that came up sharpish
the speed test link - took a good 10-15seconds...

im on 8MB BT broadband

[tommylogic]

Originally Posted by ACuity

when i clicked the web design link - that came up sharpish
the speed test link - took a good 10-15seconds...

im on 8MB BT broadband

Gotcha.. cool... and Thank you!!
The second link was probably slow because I was in the middle of debugging that particular page at that moment. Might also be partly due to caching.

[PaulClark]

Firstly, nice site!

On first access, the site did feel pretty slow to load. I think this may be more perception than reality, because nothing at all seemed to load for a few seconds, then the whole site came up more or less at once. If the page had 'built' in the browser over the same period, it might have felt quicker.

Looking at the network timings in Firebug, I see a total of 130 requests in 10.71 seconds - which actually isn't bad; back to the perception thing.

Going more into the detail, there is a whole chunk of time in the middle of the load downloading all your animated gif images for the rollover states on your Social Bookmarking links. This seems to be occupying almost 8 seconds. I think this may be where your problem is, as there are lots of these images, and they are about 1 - 2 K each.

I would suggest you first try removing the whole social bookmarks section from your page and re-test. If this is confirmed as the problem area, I suggest redoing all your social bookmarks as just 3 images.

Here's how:

• Firstly, notice that your social bookmarks are all exactly 20px square, and in every case the mouseover image is the same as the 'normal' image but with the addition of a 'pulsing' border. This means your animated images are downloading lots of bytes to do the same things over and over again.
  .
• Make a 20px square transparent gif, with nothing in it. ('bookmark.gif') Use this GIF for EVERY one of your social bookmarks.
  .
• Make a 20px square transparent animated gif ('bookmark_over.gif) with a pulsing border but otherwise nothing in it. This will be your mouseover image for EVERY one of your social bookmarks.
  .
• Arrange all your social bookmarks into one big image (bookmark_sprite.gif). This might as well by 4 rows by 9 columns of icons, just as you have now. Ensure that each icon is centred in a 20px square grid space.
  .
• Now use CSS to use the bookmark_sprite.gif image as background on EVERY one of your social bookmarks, using the background-position directive to control which icon shows through the transparent bookmark.gif / bookmark_over.gif image.

This is all a fair chunk of work, but right now you have 35 social bookmark icons and 35 mouseover icons, making 70 individual requests to your server out of a total of 130. Getting these down to just 3 requests will make a big difference to your loadtimes.

Have fun!

[tommylogic]

Yeah, I realize that. That is actually one of the things I am testing right now. I got that script from another source and had to hack the heck out of all sorts of it to get it to work properly at all (thanks again to Lead Magnet for the "window break-out" hack).

Now I have all of it running off my servers at least... so, I'm seeing exactly what needs to be tweaked and where. the code in that bookmark section is a pain in my a s s!!! SO, unless I come up with an alternative solution to that, I will have to continue to fine tune it.

[Keely Hope]

Very nice new site tommy

[tommylogic]

Thanks Keely.. much appreciated