Faster! Faster! Faster!

from WinCustomize Forums

Over the past few weeks WinCustomize has been moving to a new bandwidth compression technology that hopefully has noticeably improved performance.

A Typical WinCustomize page, uncompressed, is over 100K in size! That's a lot to download. And most of it is HTML. With the new licensed compression technology, that size has been chopped in half which should increase performance.

Or more to the point, it has increased performance since it traffic to the site has increased substantially since implemented. Of course, some of you may not be seeing this as this graph shows:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/graphs/tr_main_r7.gif (that damn worm going around has affected global response times on the Internet as a whole).

But for everyone else, hopefully the site is faster. Now, for our next trick, we're going to be migrating everything from Atlanta to California and nearly double our available bandwidth in the process on a set of brand new servers -- all thanks to WinCustomize premium subscribers! https://www.wincustomize.com/store/

9,236 views 19 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Way to go!!
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
That's neat! . . . glad to be a part of it!
CursorFX - Customize your Windows cursor
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
In the HTML to this page, you can take out 10k just be removing every instance of ptth://www.wincustomize.com

(http changed on purpose)

There are also many "Long-handed" HTML methods used in the coding of the page

For example : BACKGROUND="/themes/GreenApple/images/bg_bottom.gif" Why not just put a class on it of "greenApple"?

That's just a few simple ideas. Next would be to ditch the use of Tables in your code, but that would be a huge re-design job.


See ya,
C.
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Yea we know.  When we redesign WinCustomize we're going to go heavy with CSS.


Take a look at how we did JoeUser.com: https://www.joeuser.com.  That's how the next version of WinCustomize will be done.

Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I agree that CSS + Divs saves a substantial amount of HTML, I've managed to take sites down to less than half the code while adding more client-side functionality at the same time.

NS4 is dead
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Whee!!! I'm glad that the next version of WinCustomize will be done with DIV and CSS primarily, that should make the site MUCH lighter and simpler to code for Like st_nick, CSS and DIVs have drastically reduced the weight of my sites (by as much as 74% in once case!

As big as this site is, I expect it may make a nice splash in the designer world when the redevloping is finished
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I have noticed that the wall section is loading faster on my 56k.Didn't know why, now I do. Glad the wife and I could help in our small way. Maybe some more people can do the same.
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Wow..You know I use the Universal Metal Win custom Theme and it was kinda choppy and slow, but today..it just said BaMM! and opened up in less than a second literaly..Before it was like 3 to 4 seconds for the whole page to load..maybe a couple of extra seconds more to on occasion..Thank you vey much..
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I'm glad things are being done, cause for the past month or so, I've been avoiding WC like the plague, as a typical page would take over a minute to load, sometimes more, but most of the time wouldn't load at all (I'm on cable, granted, in Australia, but things have never been this slow before). Being a subscriber and all, that leaves me a tad disillusioned. Hope things improve soon
Reply #11 from WinCustomize Forums Top
The speed was and still is the main reason why I won't subscribe. A lot of the time I just end up looking at a page full of red X's. Oh well, maybe it will improve.
Reply #12 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Hi,

Nocool i think the speed is good. See also other reactions.

One what kind of connection are you?

Secondly: when everyone is thinking like you "the speed was ans still is .......", sure then it will never be better.

First people have to subscribe, Stardock can use the money to invest and ... voila! you get value for your money!

Think about that.....

Reply #13 from WinCustomize Forums Top
If you're getting red x's you need to talk to your ISP. WinCustomize is currently hosted at UUnet which is right on the backbone and we're not maxing any of our resources even closely.
Reply #14 from WinCustomize Forums Top
what exactly is this technology that you speak of?

Napalm(tm) by deviantART can do much more for ya than any bandwidth compression techniques!
Reply #15 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I'm on cable. 1mb. Wincustomise is the only site I have probs with... Maybe it's something at my end.... Gonna be upgrading soon, so will format.... fixes everything
Reply #17 from WinCustomize Forums Top
There iz no doubt about it,,It is very very fast.The fastest I have ever seen it.Great news StarDock.I think I might buy another year or two just to celebrate.Thanks for the upgrades and improvements.WC is indeed the fastest skinning site in the world.
Reply #18 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Jark: What is Napalm and what does it do (in the web sense I mean! )

Reply #19 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I just don't get it

In the last couple weeks the site has felt like I'm on Dial-up, I figured you guys were up to something. On some occasions the graphics will only partially load and then just stop...I have to close IE then come back.

I know it's not my end, this is the only site that does it

btw...I have a cable connection and just checked....1.8mb down and 248 up Gotta love Broadband...