The Amino Speed Project

Dear Amino Friends

I will write this in English, so our outstanding developers in Manilla, can understand you gold nuggets :-)

The whole idea is to make Amino faster and your ideas are very much appreciated.

So if you have any ideas, please share them here in English.

Thank you so much!

Cheers

Martin

Amino only scores about ~ 71/100 in the test... much to improve!

Google page speed advices you to:

Leverage browser caching
Minify CSS
Minimize redirects
Optimize images
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Specify image dimensions
Combine external JavaScript
Combine images into CSS sprites
Minify HTML
Defer loading of JavaScript
Remove unused CSS
Use efficient CSS selectors
Combine external CSS
Inline Small JavaScript
Minify JavaScript
Minimize DNS lookups
Optimize the order of styles and scripts
Put CSS in the document head
Remove query strings from static resources
Serve resources from a consistent URL
Specify a cache validator
Specify a character set early

Try work with page speed to find out how...

I just did not bother to translate everything I wrote in the other thread manually, so I just used Google Translate to your text, there may very well be errors in the text:)

Hey Martin Thorborg

Let me start off by saying that I am not ASP,. NET or Microsoft man, but PHP, MySQL and Apache. But most of the stuff I make here will apply to all websites whether they run one or the other.

But here are my tips for what you can do from looking at Amino.dk and how it is right now.

    * Merge javascript files and css files into 1 of each type of file, therefore leaving only a CSS and a JS file which the user must download. There is downloaded 14 js files and css files 7.

    * Merge image files to a minimum number. So get as many of your small images together into as few files as possible, also called CSS sprites. It is possible through CSS to use the correct image even though the components are in the same file. Right now, a user must download over 40 images from your website just to make the design you have done, eg top, buttons, menus, tops, etc. It is better that a user must download an image file of 200kb is more than 40 images each takes up 1-2KB each.

To merge the files makes the user to download fewer files from the server, which both mean less load on the server, fewer requests and thus much faster website. One must remember that design / images, css and js and everything based amino is not just the only one user should download when they visit the website. There are also all the user pictures (avatars), banner ads on amino, banner ads in people's signatures, facebook, analytics, twitter, etc. It becomes a great many files.

Yes, indeed, fill a single page, not so much but you must contact the server many times as indeed is the case of amino, then it will response time, user's Internet stability and many other things could quickly affect how quickly amino displayed.

    * Compress the image files before they are uploaded to the server. The image files are doing to be compressed into properly before uploading them to the server. This means that in not having to compress an image file before being sent to the user, because they are already compressed as much as possible, thus saving load of your server.

    * Compress and remove unnecessary code from the js and css files. This will again save the user having to download many kb, just such a thing as removing whitespace, ie spaces where they are not needed can save a lot. Taking this file: http://www.amino.dk/themes/hawaii/style/Common.css that fills 42.17 kb. But removes unnecessary code from the file, it will fill nearly 10kb smaller, then you can compress it so it only fills about 8kb (again, must be compressed before it is put up on the server) to save server forces to compress it within it is sent to the user.

    * Compress the html code and remove unnecessary code from the file. Looking at this page: http://www.amino.dk/forums/t/119405.aspx fills its html code today about 185kb, it is possible to remove unnecessary code and compress the dynamic, and we do it will be could save about 55kb only by removing unnecessary code, and further a very great deal more if you compress it. I compress it today. And this also requires much more work to do something about, since there are so many things to consider
    * For both the above points: it must also be able to download an uncompressed version, since not all browsers support gzip compression.

    * Send the correct headers along with images, js files and css files, including eg an Expires header.

      The time now is such that there is sent a Expires header, which does or can do that my browser will retrieve the same items every time I switch pages. That is to say that I am going to download images, css and js files, even if they have not changed. So does my browser not to contact the server again to retrieve files which I have already downloaded, thereby saving the server and bandwidth for a full part. And this will indeed be for all amino users.

    * Use static files where i can do it. Eg avatar images are created dynamically, it looks like about why I do not know, but they might as well be static, this will save the server a lot, as in right now make images via server side scripting. I am not a Microsoft man, but by an apache / PHP server you can get the server to run many more files (about 100 times more) per second just by changing a php file to html. It depends on what version of PHP you run. But it could be the same on a microsoft server.

It was just what I found which definitely well could do to optimize the speed of the website. Hope it can be used;) Make the will definitely feel a big difference, and simultaneously will save a quite part both the server and bandwidth.

MVH Kim

Hi guys,

Thanks for your replies. I did first become aware of this issue last night, since I have not had any problems what so ever myself and just been insanely busy with other things. It can be a bit difficult to pin point what is going in since everything runs smoothly here. But I have looked at some things, and as far as I can see the actual server side stuff seems to be fine. Currently it takes about 2-5 seconds to generate the page depending on content, and that does seem ok I would say.

On the actual page send process, some things can be done. Most of this has already been mentioned here - though no all applies to our setup. But what I think we can look at first is to use some CSS sprites for some of the stuff, and try to bundle some of the JS files. Whether this alleviates the problem some are experiencing I am not sure, but it will make the pages render a bit faster.

Anyway, thanks for your posts - hopefully you will soon see the speed improving :)

Jacob Rohde:

Currently it takes about 2-5 seconds to generate the page depending on content, and that does seem ok I would say.

5 seconds for a site like Amino is not okay, Id say.

thevicarious:

Jacob Rohde:

Currently it takes about 2-5 seconds to generate the page depending on content, and that does seem ok I would say.

5 seconds for a site like Amino is not okay, Id say.

An avg. of 3 seconds, with a worst case of 5 is fine, I would say.