Someone recently sent me a link to thechive.com, which is a sort of time-waster photoblog full of funny pictures, memes, hot girls, and random other crap. (mildly NSFW, by the way).
What I noticed immediately about the site is that it seems to load pretty slowly (even given the large number of images on it), and scrolling up and down the page is really, really slow. It seems to really tax my browser/computer.
I loaded up Activity Monitor and can see that my CPU usage goes way up on that site compared to others, so this isn’t just a subjective thing.
So is there something non-obvious going on behind the scenes that causes the performance issues? I’m not really tech savvy enough to speculate on what that might be, but when I go there I think: this website is doing more than just serving up a bunch of pictures.
Anyone know what the deal is? From searching around the website seems to be legit enough that I don’t think it’s doing anything malicious, but it sure seems to be doing something.
The pictures are probably huge. In Internet Explorer, right-click on a picture and select Properties and check the size. If it is larger than 20-30 Kb – and there are a lot of similar-sized pictures on each page – that is probably the problem. (In Firefox, right-click on the picture and select View Image Info.)
The site may also have caching disabled so every visit to the page means the pictures are downloaded again.
[Soapbox]
There are a lot of factors regarding the websites that we all visit.
A website these days is not just one entity, far from it.
Optimizing for all platforms is the responsibility of a web development team. Sometimes that team consists of only one or two people. Who are newbies, or are just relying on their web development platform to make things nice.
It’s easy to put up a website. Making it responsive to all users takes a little more effort.
For an example - SDMB.
Sometimes I have to wait for their external links (ad servers, Google Analytics, etc.) to load in addition to waiting on their host server connections and dealing with vBulletin software bottlenecks. And BTW my particular browser factors into this mess - as does yours.
All this is expected by me, as I love this board.
(I just wish they would upgrade from 3.7 but that is not my call).
Good websites cost money. Good coding costs money.
In the scheme of things though, that site that’s run out of a “server” in Podunk, Iowa might out-perform CNN.com if conditions are right.
[/Soapbox]
In general, if a page is tying up the CPU for an extended time period, it is because of JavaScript or Flash. Nothing else is really that CPU intensive. (Okay, Java, but no one uses that anymore.)
What browser are you using? Internet Explorer, up through version 8, has really slow JavaScript. Firefox 3.6 and lower also has fairly slow JavaScript. What version of Flash are you using? I still find that 10.1 is the fastest, but 10.3 (the current version) is okay. Flash 10.0 or less is slow.