Load speeds - Any way to know the speed?

They have: 120 posts

Joined: Apr 1999

a friend of mine is getting really bad loading times on a university server he's using. The sysadmins are unwilling/not capable of helping the poor guy out.
He wants to know if there is any site or place around that can calculate a sites loading time?

Does anyone know?
What's your ideas on loading time troubleshooting?

Jes

Brian Farkas's picture

They have: 1,015 posts

Joined: Apr 1999

Try reducing the number of images, or at least reducing their colors. If that doesn't help, it's time to find a new server. Also, you can break really big pages into smaller sub-pages.

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InfoStar: Web Design - Hosting - Programming
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They have: 372 posts

Joined: Dec 1998

Hi Jess,
Check out: http://www.websitegarage.com It will tell him how fast on different connections and all kinds of stuff, free! Wink

HTH
Curtis

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They have: 4 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Use a site validator. It will tell you the load time of one or all links. Also suggest compression of gif or jpg images. I believe the second site has a gif compressor to crunch their sizes.
Add height/width/alt to images. Get rid of animated gif's. Are they really necessary or just an ego thing? I went through that stage and quit when I found how long my site was taking to load.
http://siteinspector.linkexchange.com/
http://209.238.38.130/html_check.htm
http://validator.w3.org/

Andy.

They have: 89 posts

Joined: Jul 1999

I've found several things impact load time.

1) backgrounds - if you use a background "image", keep it consistent on all pages. Once the background is loaded, all other pages load a lot faster.

2) image size (I try to keep mine under 400 pixels wide).

3) make sure your image tag is complete. I was once told all image tags need to supply the width, height, border & alt (what message pops up when the mouse pointer is on the image). For example:

<img src="/yourpicture.jpg" width=300 height=50 border=0 alt="this is a great idea! click now!">

4) The loading time will be greatly affected if you are not using the correct dimensions on an image. View your uploaded image. Your dimensions will be displayed in the top left corner of your browser.

5) and I agree that the NUMBER of images can make it load a lot slower.

6) and I've used the LinkExchange Site Inspector quite frequently with great results.

Hope this helps. I know it helped me.

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They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

As I do not have your web site in front of me it's hard to say, but one of the basic problem with graphics on the net today is image formats; Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is best used for color intensive images, such as photos. Graphics interchange format (GIF) and other bit mapped formats are much better for low color use, as they can show the same quality at a much smaller size.

You can normally use Adobe PhotoShop or Jasc Paint Shop Pro to shrink image size by playing around with the format, amount of colors, and dithering. However I’d highly suggest downloading an image compression software program. There are quite a few including Adobe ImageReady, DeBabelizer, and Ulead SmartSaver.

Good Luck..

Adam
http://aisinternet.hypermart.net

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

By the way: as a rule youc an say that an image exported with the Photoshop Gif Exporter is only half as big as an image safed with Photoshop as Gif.

Load time can also be affected by tables. If its not absolutely neccessary to have everything in one big table split you page up in sub tables, so parts can be displayed before the whole page is loaded.

Later,

Malte

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They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

If your looking for another server to host your website, check out www.xoom.com.

They give you 20mb and it is quite a fast server for a free one. They place a small add at the top of each page within a frame - there are no annoying popup windows.

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