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Message # 27690.1.2

Subject: Re: Increased WWF load/render speed!

Date: Mon 26/02/07 05:39:36 GMT

Name: Telcontar

Email: mrnemesis@ntlworld.com

Website:

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I'm still surprised by how many people are on dial-up -- many through to rurality alone. You'd have to be extremely rich even in the US to have a phone company roll out cable and repeater stations all the way out to your middle-of-nowhere house :P

Efficient Web development has many advantages. Lower overall site traffic (saves money), less space on the server, greater traffic effciency from one end of the Internet to the other, faster render time etc. Even a fast site on a fast Internet connection can be competing with other users from anywhere upstream down to other people on the local network. It's especially true of the source or destination country only has a limited pipe, such as Russia or New Zealand.

And even a handful of dial-up users here and there are worth considering.

Now that I finally have live JPEG save preview and an understanding of chroma subsampling, it's quite surprising the savings you can make (cranking up to extreme quality to preserve red can can be solved by switching off subsampling). Screenshots: use the right format (PNG, JPEG or GIF). Decrease colour depth for lossless images, and use PNG instead of GIF for a notable saving (though not always true). Use optimum image saving (e.g. "Save for Web") and run an optimiser if you can (e.g. OptiPNG for PNG images).

It also helps not to save images too large and the shoehorn them into a tiny space using HTML -- you still have to download the complete image, and then resize or resample it afterwards.

In reply to Message (27690.1)

Re: Increased WWF load/render speed!

By MG - Mon 26/02/07 00:40:40 GMT

Website:

It is probably hard for those of you who have had broadband for years to realize that there are still many on dial up internet connection.The pics get bigger and with higher resolution they can take a long time to download. On dial up some are nearly impossible to open.Not to mention videos ..the new way to sell wetlook online via videos cannot even be considered by dial up users.

As favourite sites like this one get more and more into flashy banners it won't be long until it also will be inaccessable to dial up users.

In reply to Message (27690)

Increased WWF load/render speed!

By Telcontar - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Sun 25/02/07 23:31:00 GMT

Website:

At the top of the WWF Active Topics page is a grid of ad banners for various sites. Each one is stored on a different server, none of them are pre-scaled and many aren't optimised, period.

Right now, at the bottom, I see these two:

Into the Water dedicated 150x30 banner, 2 k.

Jeans and Pants 468x60 banner -- shrunk by the HTML -- 34 k!

Think about the modem load time for 34 k of data (8 seconds at 4 k/sec) to load a tiny banner that could be as low as 2 k (0.5 sec) if it was scaled and optimised at the source.

Worse, by placing every image on a different server, you can't take any advantage of pipelining or keep-alive. Even requests to ask "has this image changed?" (standard If-Modified-Since conditional GET) require a separate three-way handshake to a new server and can't be chained via keep-alive.

Finally, the browser has to reduce every image to fit into all the slots.

This has to be the slowest-loading site I've ever seen, mostly from waiting for all the HTML to come in, but for people who surf in privacy mode (clear cache on exit), on dial-up etc, you could do a lot to help them by cleaning up the banner situation.

Ideally, you'd host them all on your own site to reduce the number of TCP connections and DNS lookups needed, but even if not, you could still improve it by ensuring that the various sites supply sensible images, scaled and cropped to fit.

The WetInRed site hosted its own copies of all the banners for the Links page, with this same flaw. It came to 500 k of banner images! (Imagine that on a modem ...) From scaling and roughly optimising them all I took 100 k or more off the total. 400 k is still a lot, but these are larger banners on Steve's site -- 468 px wide generally. Personally I prefer plain text for links in the first place, but maybe those on his page need reducing also? With reduced size comes reduced clarity and reduced impact ... Not sure what to do about that one.

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