Size matters....what affects website loading time?

[OneGrassRoot]

I would imagine embedded videos are a huge size issue for websites, and that I must be mindful of size and number of images used.

Do widgets substantially slow down a website's loading time for those on dial-up?

Anything else that may be slowing a site that newbies such as myself don't consider?

Thanks. :)

[Deja Q]

1. Embedded videos to a point

The video starts as a link and is downloaded once the end user clicks the 'play' button.

Images - both quantity of and size of each matters. Also consider many smaller ones are perceived to load faster than one giant one. Adobe Photoshop, by far, has the best size/quality ratio of any web-friendly app I've used...

[OneGrassRoot]

2. Oh wow, you changed your name!

Hi there :)

What about widgets? Are they comparable to small images, or is there something that makes them difficult to load in some way?

Thanks for the tidbit about multiple small images versus one large image.

:)

[RoyGBiv]

3. Embedding videos ...

It's a bit more complicated than that.

A page with a slew of embedded flash videos will have significantly altered load times. While the entire video is not loaded, the "player" is, for each instance of an embedded video, and one frame of the video will be displayed.

I've been dealing with this for a site I took over from someone else. It's structured so that some pages have dozens of videos on it, and the damn thing is just a snail on load times. I'm currently trying to break it up into smaller pages to improve this.

[ChromeFoundry]

4. shouldn't the player load from the client's cache?

...unless you have a pragma for immediate expiration on the player's source?

I can see the first visit having a slight lag while the player caches.. but after that, I would expect it to haul ass.

[RoyGBiv]

5. It doesn't ...

... or it isn't.

I suspect what I'm experiencing is either a bug in flash and/or Firefox, a problem with NBC's site, or something wrong in the object code I have, which I didn't create and don't understand entirely.

Just before I came here, in fact, I had a page open with five videos embedded from NBC's site. I'd pressed play on none of them. My processor was steady at 60% usage for about ten minutes, and Firefox was consuming about 300 Mb of memory. When loading the page, each player seemed to load separately, top first, then the bottom two, then the other two. One took a long time to display the first frame. Also, the initial rendering of the other page elements, which are minimal, was perceptibly slow.

I closed just that one tab while doing nothing else, and the CPU dropped off to around 2%.

I'm still experimenting. I've actually not dealt with this directly before and so am not entirely sure what I'm doing here. I've noticed that Talking Points Memo has become hellaciously slow lately, but I chalked that up to ten tons of javascript running.

[ChromeFoundry]

6. May want to grab a capture with WireShark...

just to see if you are experiencing a JavaScript rendering lag or actual lag due to network traffic from multiple downloads.

I loaded TPM in <1.5 seconds with FF 3.0.6 on XP SP3.

[RoyGBiv]

8. I'll do that ...

Does your load time for TPM include allowing all javascript? I tried it just now both ways, with just YouTube allowed and then with everything. I got a similar time as you with YouTube allowed, but when I turned on everything and refreshed, it slowed way down.

And everyone ignore my comments that begin this sub-thread. I jumped to a conclusion. I should stop that. Was experiencing frustration with this mess. (Side Note: These pages I've been working on a real disaster areas. I've lost count of the number of classes called that aren't even in the css doc, the empty elements, long streams of <br /> for no damn good reason, etc. This is gonna take forever.)

I think I figured out some of this. It does seem to be, somewhat, the NBC site, more specifically the code they give you for embedding their videos. I stripped it down to the object element, and things loaded a bit faster. I *think* this may have something to do with NBC's player and the way it works.

Also, embedded videos from YouTube don't have quite the same problem. I have a page with about a dozen of them, and nothing is lagging there.

Going to bed ...

I'll check for rending lag tomorrow. I'm pretty sure it's not network lag. I'm only experiencing problems with these pages ... and TPM with all the javascript, but that's been for awhile from multiple computers at various locations.

[ChromeFoundry]

10. Most of the

JavaScript is failing for me, so my DL times are probably not accurate for you. tons of object not found errors.

My hosts file blocks google-analytics as well as most Ad sites. My guess is that your slow load times are JavaScript related.

I see the site also has a couple blocks of 'encrypted' JavaScript code: look for "hivelogic_enkoder()"

Sorry I can't be of more help.

[Seldona]

7. For Firefox users.

http://www.forevergeek.com/2004/12/make_firefox_faster/

This is mainly for broadband users. It does work though, in my experience.

There are links to other ways to optimize Firefox there, as well as how to avoid slowing down load times. I am sure there are ways to optimize IE as well. Just don't use it personally.

[OneGrassRoot]

9. Awesome. Thank you! :) n/t

[Seldona]

11. My pleasure.

That site is very useful for FF users imo. Glad you found something helpful.

[struggle4progress]

12. Sometimes DNS can cause slowdowns: if you have a webpage that

loads content from a number of other webpages, every one of those addresses involves a DNS look-up

So a visitor who doesn't have all the addresses already cached is going to be doing a lot of DNS look-ups

This isn't a problem if the visitor has a speedy connection and is using a browser with common DNS protocols

But it can be a problem: last year, Safari (under Mac OS X) defaulted to a DNS protocol that most DNS servers didn't use; the result was that pages typically tried and tried DNS look-ups before attempting a different protocol; if a page involved many DNS look-ups, then load times could sometimes run into the multi-minute range

Bottom line: some users may be grateful if you limit how much content must be retrieved from other sites for proper page display; for example, some people just won't wait around while a page with dozens of ads loads