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Friday, February 20, 2015

Tweaking The Tavern - For Speed!

I received an email earlier today that The Tavern has been slow to load recently. I haven't seen it myself at home, but working off of 4g here at work, I can see the need to tweak a bit to quicken load times.

I'm sure last night's upload or art didn't help things much - I suspect those files were a bit large ;)

Let me know if you have any issues.

One thing I'll be doing is pruning the blog roll of inactive blogs. I pruned a bit earlier today and I think there are still 132 or so in the blog roll. I'll be aiming to remove any blog that hasn't updated in the last 60 days or so.

11 comments:

  1. I have one machine that is brutally slow loading the main page (only a little clunky on an article-specific page), and it may or may not be a coincidence that it never can get the Tavern Chat frame to load. None of my other computer/browser combos seem to have much trouble with the site. It would only be fair to mention, though, that this machine in question seems to have plenty of other problems in loading plenty of other websites ;)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. well, I've dropped some graphics and pruned some blogs - seems a wee bit faster loading on the Chromebook

      in the future I'll downsize graphics i use in posts if the files are significantly large

      Delete
  2. It just fired up way more quickly for me this time. It worked.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. i suspect the blog list must be trimmed a bit more - even though it only displays the last 25 to update, it loads all 132 in the background

      Delete
  3. Erik: It is slow for me, but living in the deep woods with 1MB of Extended DSL, I'm used to high graphic sites downloading at "dial-up" speeds...Most times I can't even load Amazon since they have went graphic heavy...and my phone company has no solution for me...lol...but no problems, I'll keep an eye out and see if I notice any difference now...at least my spending on Amazon has dropped tremendously.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Chrome Developer Console Audit suggests the following. Where you can't combine scripts (such as 3rd party ones) you might consider cutting back on ones you don't really need.

    Network Utilization
    1. Combine external CSS. There are 4 CSS files from www.blogger.com that can be combined into 1 file to go from 4 network requests to 1.
    2. Combine (or remove some) external javascript. 15 Javascript files are served from apis.google.com.
    3. Combine (or remove some) external javascript. 4 Javascript files are served from www.blogger.com.
    4. Combine (or remove some) external javascript. 4 Javascript files are served from chatwing.com.
    5. Combine (or remove some) external javascript. 3 Javascript files are served from translate.googleapis.com.
    6. Combine (or remove some) external javascript. 5 Javascript files are served from www.google.com.
    7. chatwing.com/comet is causing the site to be slower than it should be. The audit suggests gzipping it but that isn't an option. My suggestion would be to remove this from the front page at least.
    8. There are a lot of caching issues on the site (172 files have problems). Either their cache expirations are too fast or they aren't being cached at all. If you need a list, I can send you one or run an audit on your end.
    9. Make sure your CSS files are loaded before any JS files. This lets the CSS files download in parallel instead of waiting for a script to load. Specifically these are 3681447274-widget_css_2_bundle.css, authorization.css, and translateelement.css.
    10. There are many other smaller optimizations you can make as proposed by the audit.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm no coder, so most of that stuff is out.

      Chatwing stays on the main page, because no one ever goes anywhere else ;)

      Delete
  5. I've removed icons and pics from the blog roll, and removed about 25 or so blogs from the roll. that should speed things up just a tad more

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think the chat is what slows me down - I know when I'm on wireless it's rough to "quickly" check the tavern.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Your site loaded much faster for me today than it has been loading in the past month or so.

    ReplyDelete

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