slow loading of site

[byron]

Those of you who like me are saddled with a modem connection (unable to get broadband) will have noticed that the messages are taking longer and longer to load up. This is because of the extensive use of photos and/or emoticons in the messages by us... the users.
I am therefore ceasing to use any photo alongside my name and emoticons in my messages. I hope that others might follow suit. The more people that do so the faster this site will become.


http://www.alexander-advertising.co.uk

 

[EME]

Remove Your Photos !

Complete. Oldtimers now moving a little easier. same blooming day manged to crack it !!

Respectful suggestion, given you is pro marketeer, a more 'In YourFace' Fred title might be more successful?

<font color=black>I am WHAT I say I am

 

[kimhollamby]

Byron, emoticons are less of a problem; they carry a low memory overhead and sit in browser cache most of the time. Most of the problems come with large images; for example some of the animated GIFs and pics used in user IDs carry quite an overhead and are also not always hosted on the fastest servers.

We're on a 100Mb burstable connection now right on the main Internet hub in London so nothing gets too badly squeezed at our end although we are also moving the forums to a better server fairly soon.

kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com

 

[KevL]

Bog off, it took ages to set up that little picture ;-)

You can set your user options to profile pictures on or off by clicking on "user options" > "Display preferences....." then ath the bottom of the screen you will find:-

View other user's pictures in their profile?
No Yes

View user's pictures with their posts?
No Yes

Turn them both ot "off" and Robert is your dads brother.

KevL


--
It may be the early bird that catches the worm but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.

 

[jfm]

No! Problem is fixed at your end

Byron, you can turn off receipt of pictures in your user profile. It isn't necessary for the rest of us to delete our pics.

Yours sincerely, a broadband user.....

 

[byron]

Re: No! Problem is fixed at your end

Hmmmm! Never thought of that. Kim? is the stuff still there behind the scene or will I actually improve download.
JFM ! feel pity for those of us lumbered with a modem.

http://www.alexander-advertising.co.uk

 

[Guest]

i have got broadband and i also find the site v. slow and v. fustrating.... sor it!!!

 

[andyball]

Hmmm...tried before to turn off user pics : self & several others find that switching them off makes no difference-they still display- Kim didn't know why

 

[kimhollamby]

Yes, we currently have some kind of bug where, if you have previously enabled user pix and then turn them off they stay on. It's on the list.

kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com

 

[kimhollamby]

Re: No! Problem is fixed at your end

Turn off the pix and you shouldn't see the user pix and the page won't ask for them. That said if they keep appearing then bear with us and some (not all) people that turn them off still get them. Strange one that is taking us a bit of time to track down.


kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com

 

[qsiv]

I do think a version of the site optimised for low bandwidth clients would be very useful - and might well have marketability as a bonus for you.

There are several people using really low bandwidth connections (I suspect) and the graphics overhead is a killer - I know it was when I was in Turkey a few weeks ago.

Just peek at www.thinspired.com to see how quick things CAN be. I dont think advertisers need worry - no one on 56k or better would choose the bald low bandwidth site - but for GSM/satphone users it would be a boon.

 

[kimhollamby]

Now that's what I like, some friendly feedback!

We're not being smug about anything here and as I tried to indicate we're on a programme of making improvements but our server stats tell us we're averaging full page load times of 8 sec across our user base which is a lot better than many sites I visit.

As I said, we're not complacement however and there should be some further improvements in the pipeline 'ere long.

kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com

 

[EME]

Eight seconds........end to end on 56k....send the boys around we've got a job for them...

<font color=black>I am WHAT I say I am

 

[JEG]

I like the picture of PB.

 

[ToMo]

Now what I want to know is, just exactly how long is 'ere - and not measured in this funny foreign stuff; LJS doesn't like it and Haydn doesn't understand it.

TôMö

 

[kimhollamby]

'ere = we're on loan servers at the moment and it's costing us extra dosh so there's every incentive to take the next step once we are sure the new ones have passed the necessary sea trials etc etc.

Meantime we've eliminated bandwidth bottlenecks simply by moving from 2Mb capped to 100Mb burstable and we've done other stuff too. We know from our direct links with the server farm that our server isn't stalling (most forum pages serve within a second or so on our T3 connection unless the poster is hosting a big image on it), although we do have a small memory issue from time to time which we monitor and sort on the fly - it's a bug that will get solved when we move.

Probably worth remembering that domestic broadband connections are contended (shared with other users) and not all ISPs have the most direct route to the Internet so there are lots of factors at play when it comes to page download times.

kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com

 

[kimhollamby]

I understand what you are saying as I link into the website quite a bit via GSM.

Out of interest which parts of the site would you welcome being in stripped-down format?

kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com

 

[ToMo]

*Pauline* - 'Wicked Grin'

TôMö

 

[qsiv]

This has to be a personal view, but I feel a low bandwidth version of the home page (the default page takes forever), together with the news and forum entry points. The individual mews pages would be best as text only (forget the gratuitous mag logos!). This would also help users accessing via PDA's.

My guess s that the forum pages are already fairly low bandwidth (bar the YBW banners etc). Depending on how it was all designed it may only need some changes to CSS - OTOH it could be a lot of work!

I accessed the site from Turkey (holiday & IPAQ) and from the boat in the summer (PC & either GSM or GPRS).

It would also be worthwhile in a low banwidth site to have individual entry points for the 4 browsers you explicitly provide support for as there is a significant chunk of code on most pages that is simply along the lines of If Opera else if Netscape else if IE - this can be a significant overhead in a low bandwidth context.

 

[kimhollamby]

You are right that one of the headaches is providing cross platform/OS/browser support. You are also right that there's a lot of work in this. And as for the news, well we have a lot of people linking into us for that and if we don't serve some kind of navigation on the standard pages we stand no chance of doing anything thereafter with their interest.

But thanks for the thought; it is an interesting tease and we'll see whether we can progress it in some way.

Incidentally you should at least find the sites a bit easier to use in mobile terms now we've removed most of the framesets; it does mean you can target individual pages with ease. That took quite a fair bit of time to engineer in such a way that we weren't taking whole sites offline while doing it. Relieved to be the other side of that project now.

kim_hollamby@ipcmedia.com