Reduce the size of the Straight Dope banner on the top of the page.
It’s currently 466 x 119 pixels and 256 colours - and is just under 7K. It’s also rather large in comparison to the current trends of the web.
Reduce the size to a more elegant 200 x 51 pixels, and reduce the number of colours to 8 (I’ve done this here with no discernible loss of quality) and it’s only 2.15K. Feel free to use this if you think it’s a good idea.
Caches notwithstanding, you’d save 5K per page view - which would add up to a lot of bandwidth saving over the course of a day.
Correct me if I’m wrong, Arnold’s usually the one to do the tech stuff, but: wouldn’t the SD banner be in your cache after you first download it? I doubt it needs to be picked up from the SD server everytime someone loads a page.
Aye, it’s usually cached for me. If I use Opera with the ‘used cached images only’ setting it still displays (providing I haven’t cleared the cache, obviously).
On most users’ PCs it would be cached, and also cached if someone’s using a proxy server. I suppose the true saving would be shown by the number of unique users per day.
The server logs should show the amount of times the image is actually accessed, as opposed to cached file requests.
It was just an excuse really: I’m motivated by the aesthetics.
I got so blasé about the logo being there that I didn’t realise how visible it was to my boss, 20 yards away. I now have to open teensy little windows and scroll down hurriedly. Of course I’m sure he now recognises the grey/white stripes as well…
Something else that could be considered to save bandwidth is using compression like mod_gzip. Compresses the text output which is proberly using a great deal more bandwidth than the few images and the banner does.
Changing bitmaps for aesthetics/efficiency would probably be more Gaudere’s forte, but 7K is minuscule! And I’m not convinced that we need to go to additional trouble to make it easier for people to surf the web at work.
Nevertheless I will raise the idea with the powers that be, but I doubt any change will be made.
Reviving thread to indulge pathological geekyness, with some additional options…Even if you don’t choose to resize the image, there are several ways to cut the file size down. I realize that the bandwidth used by the banner isn’t really significant, but heck, there’s nothing wrong with saving The Reader a couple bucks, and the modem users half a second, is there?
Keep the current image as a GIF, but reduce the number of colors. This has the most modest size savings, but has no cons. I think 2k can be shaved off of it with no visible difference, bringing the file down to about 5k.
Change the format of the current image to PNG. Pros: Absolutely no change in appearance of the image, at all. Much smaller file size. Con: People using web browsers older than v4.0 won’t be able to see the image, but its hardly critical to the functioning of the site.
Do both! Same Cons as #2, but the file size ends up being the smallest of the bunch.
Overall, however much I might personally lust over option #3, #1 probably makes the most sense for the board in general. No visitors are lost, and there is a moderate file size savings. Actually reducing the dimensions along with #1, as jjimm originally suggested, would help even more.
I’ve just saved this page to my hard disk. The page itself is 118k. The images total to 22k. Grand total - 140k. This makes the banner 5 percent of the total. Even if eliminating the banner entirely caused a corresponding drop in response time (unlikely), it wouldn’t be noticed.
I was going to start a thread on this but I might as well post it here as I’m sure the ever-vigilant Arnold will see it anyway.
Is there anything sacred about fifty posts per page? When I’m viewing a thread with say, 45 responses, it can take forever to load. This wastes both my time and the server’s bandwidth if I’m re-visiting a thread and only want to see the last fifteen or so responses.
In some forums, this probably isn’t a big deal. But in GD or the Pit, the posts can be quite long. If the page size were, say, 25 posts instead of 50, the server would have to do considerably less work because it won’t have to serve up those 30 posts that I don’t really need to see again.
It’s true that shorter pages might have some effect on the continuity of the debate. On the other hand, I doubt fifty posts per page has been emperically determined to be optimal.
Oh, and Rowrrbazzle, I think the 5% number may be misleading. My understanding is that sometimes, even a small increase in server load can dramatically erode performance. It’s not really linear. If you could decrease the server load by 10 or 15%, you might see a pretty dramatic decrease in response time.
