3
Hi sunsnapper,
You are right that javascript and images will be cached by the client one the site has been loaded once. However, the theory I'm working on (which might be wrong) is that there is a high latency value with my site. So if I can reduce the amount of HTTP requests it'll speed up my site loading time regardless. Wouldn't it be quicker if in one HTTP request 5 or 6 images could be called for and downloaded if need be rather than calling them all one at a time? I suppose it would also have a lot to do with the way the requests are processed. If the processing of a request isn't started until the previous one is completed, then reducing the total number of HTTP requests would have a large impact on performance. However, I can't imagine this is the case as it wouldn't make sense. I imagine that all the requests are sent off at the same time. Still, the pure fact of having less to process should help shouldn't it?
I've tried to use as few images as possible, and control colour content using HTML and CSS as much as possible. The images I have used have been optimized to the nth degree using web function in PS7 which got the toal graphics content down to about 30K. However, there are a few images I don't think relevant anymore which I'm going to get rid of which should reduce it by nearly a further 10k.
One thing I'll be doing over the weekend is relocating all the images back to my server. A few months ago I moved them all to a free webspace located on my servers ISP to try and minimize the use of bandwidth on my site. I can't help but wonder if this has actually slowed it down, as all the images hosted on this free web space are the last to render when loading the site.
I found a few websites and tools that help with analysing site performance. The sites I used are:
http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi
I also downloaded web stress testing tools from
Paessler and
Microsofts Web Application Stress Tool which look like they do a bit more of what I'm looking for. However, I'm still yet to find just a simply utility that will gather these stats on a once off basis with minimal setup and configuration.