DJ Says...

on BigJolly lately has been treated to a different look almost daily it seems. This is because I've been trying to improve load times. The more multimedia and graphics that I website has, the slower it loads. Duh.

But there is a lot more to it than that. Background scripts take a lot of time to load, especially some of the java based ones. The quantity of small images affect load time. Compression and caching affect load time. All in all, it's been interesting.

The current look is very fast, comparatively speaking. I could drop the video and get about a 30% throughput increase but the footprint is already so small that I don't think I will. Obviously this mostly affects dialup users but even broadband users will click away if it takes too long to load.

Still using Joomla!, which is now at version 1.5.8. I changed servers from a VPS hosted solution in California to a dedicated one in Chicago. Huge increase in throughput but it did take some time to set up correctly. I'm using CentOS 5.2 on that server because it is very, very stable. I have another server that I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit on. There is a good throughput increase with the 64-bit system but it isn't quite as stable.

I've got all kinds of systems running now. In addition to the two servers and the VPS (also running CentOS), I have a laptop running Ubuntu Ultimate 2.0 64-bit, a laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit, my home destop running Windows Vista, another desktop running Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit and this machine, a powerful machine with an Intel quad-core running Fedora 10 with virtual machines of WinXP, Debian 4.0, Ubuntu 8.1, SUSE 11.1 and Linux Mint.

Maybe someday, I'll know what I'm doing!

in Jollyville today.

I take back my earlier statement that I can't optimize this site because of the hard drive bottleneck. Wrong.

Thanks to this free web optimizer, I've already cut the total bytes for the home page from 614k to 468k, about a 24% decrease in bandwidth requirements.

I've also enabled Joomla's caching. Normally, I wouldn't do that because I'm used to high traffic sites. But let's face it, this page isn't high traffic. So, I've got it set to cache every 15 minutes, which should accomodate all of the traffic here. I'd be surprised if it didn't. I'm down from a high of about 4,000 views a day to less than 2,000 because I stopped updating for awhile. And the Google search bot punishes you severly for that! ;-)

And the last thing I've done takes advantage of the extra horsepower under the hood. I've enabled gzip so that every page gets compressed before it is served to the user. Now, if I had the reverse situation, no cpu horsepower and high disk throughput, that wouldn't make sense but in this case, it does.

And one last thing, related to the vps, I increased the memory limits from 384/768 full time/burst to 512/1024.

Bottom line? First page load speeds early this morning from this box were averaging 68 seconds. They are now averaging 27 seconds, an decrease of almost 2/3's. Not bad. More to do but that helps my attitude!

Of course, YMMV.