I’ve been experimenting a bit and am pretty sure I have found something that will speed things up for me and possibly everyone else. This refers specifically to users of Internet Explorer, but may apply to other browsers as well.
When the board is slow I often see that the graphics on the SDMB pages (e.g., banner and buttons) add considerably to the load time and server bandwidth. I was thinking there might be an option that was set on the server side that was forcing the gifs to be reloaded each time a page was accessed. Instead I think that there is something we humble dopers could do ourselves.
Here is what I found (this is IE 5.5 and may vary for other versions). Under Internet options (aka Internet properties) under the “General” tab there is a “Settings” button for Temporary Internet Files. Here you can specify how often the browser should check for new versions of pages that have been visited before. After playing around, I think it doesn’t work quite like Microsoft implies.
I had “Every visit to the page” selected. I’m not sure if this is the default or if I changed it to this at some point in the past. If this is selected it seems that IE checks to see if anything on the page has changed. If not, IE pulls the page from your local cache. But if anything has changed (e.g., a new post to a thread), this option seems to force a reload of everything including the elements which haven’t changed (graphics).
If you select “Automatically”, I find that IE works the way I want it to. IE still checks to see if the page has changed, but if it has IE only downloads the elements of the page that have changed. The gif files are NOT downloaded unnecessarily. (Note that the “?” help for this option seems to be incorrect. It says that IE only checks for new page content if you accessed the page from a prior IE session or prior day.)
The big question is what is the default setting. If the default is “Automatically”, then I have only found something to help myself. But if the default is “Every visit”, then if all of the IE using dopers change the setting then we should be able to cut down the bandwidth required of the server.