[thelist] objects and site speed

Bob Meetin bobm at dottedi.biz
Fri May 16 08:03:47 CDT 2008


Ken Schaefer wrote:
> I'm sure there's some benefit. But I suspect that it's a bit marginal.
>
> HTTP v1.1 supports "keep-alives" so connections are re-used. All browsers support gzip or similar content compression these days, so you can already minimize the size of your HTML/CSS/Javascript/text based resources.
>
> Certainly if you have 1 million little images files, and turn that into 10, you'll see a faster rendering view in your browser. But if you turn 20 images into 10, I doubt there'd be anything you'd notice as an end user.
>
> Cheers
> Ken
>   
==>>

I downloaded firebug and yslow.  They are incredibly useful, as is the 
websiteoptimization site.  Where and why I am with this?  I have several 
clients for whom I have set up with Joomla CMS and the Virtuemart 
eCommerce component and one of the various template systems offered for 
Joomla.  The basic joomla structure includes a triad of CSS, JavaScript, 
etc files along with test.  The template system which we like comes with 
a ton of addons, some of which can be disabled through if/else tests, 
setting whatever to false, etc.  This all compiles and it now becomes a 
Cadillac with chrome hood ornaments. 

The task at hand is to take the Cadillac, strip off the excess baggage 
and deliver an aerodynamic solution.  It takes many hours to test, 
merge, delete unnecessary components but is worth it from my 
perspective.  With some minor theme customization the 600K Caddy is now 
an <250K Renault.  The goal is to get to somewhere around 150k.  I am 
systematically taking the many CSS files and combining them to one (also 
with a couple IE bug fix variations), then later to remove unnecessary 
white space, all the while documenting the process, steps so that future 
changes are doable.

With this particular template system they provide theme (color) 
variations with a default set of background images as well as custom 
versions based upon color.  In essence I think it's an incredibly smart 
way to deliver options, but yet provides extraneous images which also 
need to be uniqued.

-Bob






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