Hey everyone,

The tech guy here. Let us know how fast things are loading in your neck of the woods.

I am on a DSL line and it takes zero time to load!

I'm on Cable and it's super fast..

very good here also on cable:)

and Im the working the good old fashion phone line.

I'm on cable.

I'm not saying that it's slow however, when when I click on any URL in the forum I first see the background image and then there's tiny pause before a thread loads.

Home Page:

Time it took for the first byte: 735 milli seconds
Entire page load time : 1.985 seconds

This Poll:
How many hand-code? How many WYSIWIG?

Took 2.47 seconds

I think a page load time of 1 to 3 seconds is very good considering how content and functionality intensive these pages are.

It's a rendering issue with Internet Explorer. For some reason, IE likes to load everything on the page before it displays it. And since we're pulling in ads from Google and Adbrite, it pauses and waits for those. :(

I'd have to admit it's been bugging me for a few days.

Try loading the site in Firefox and you'll see the difference... it loads almost immediately. I've got a few guys here looking at the site to see what we can do about altering the way it renders, perhaps breaking up the pages in smaller segments...

I'll be sure to post any changes in the "what's new" section of our forums.

Hmm... that's a good observation with IE. One solution is to have the Ad code in a
<div> tag which appears *after the content* , but try absolute positioning or relative positioning with CSS to have the div tag visually appear at the top.

But this kind of implementation might have a few browser rendering and incompatibality issues depending on the users screen resolution or browser version etc. It doesn't hurt to experiment though.

But the bottom line is that we forum members usually pay more attention to the content more than anything else. So a small time lag in the speed of the page is a almost unnoticable. It's definitely not worth too much trouble in trying to fix it.

On one of my sites I have the same problem too. Sometimes AdSense hangs and it makes the page appear as if it's loading very slow.

After redesigning the site using a structure so that the AdSense ads appear on the right hand side vertical navigation.

Inside the HTML code the code for side navigation was *after* the main content.

This made the page load the main content faster independent of the speed of loading AdSense.


Firefox loads it properly, I don't see the timelag there.

We did some tests today on the layout of the site, disabling/enabling Adbrite and AdSense. They're not the culprit. /sigh

I had a hunch that it was because image sizes weren't in the HTML for every image, so I wrote a script that modified every template and inserted proper WIDTH and HEIGHT tags for the 2100+ images on the site. Nope... /sigh *again*

I'll get them to mess around with the html table dimensions tomorrow to see if we can't plug in more static numbers rather than percentages. The site isn't performing horribly for the size of the pages we're serving, but we still see room for improvement. We'll keep chipping away at it...

Today it seems quite fast, I don't experience any timelag even with IE.

Yes, specifying image width and height definitely increases the speed as the browser doesn't have to think what width and height it should use to display the image.

Sometimes I white-space compress files so that the indentation and extra lines are removed. This contributes a small amount to the speed.

But white-space compressing has some side effects one should watch out for.

If the code has open-style comments like // for example, then everything following the // will be commented out when everything after that comment line falls on just 1 line.