Faster! Faster! Faster!

Tuesday, September 9, 2003 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News

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/

19 Reply 2 Referrals
Ande
Reply #1 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 5:55 AM
Way to go!!

Brock Beesley
Reply #2 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 7:17 AM
That's neat! . . . glad to be a part of it!

themorphium
Reply #3 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 8:30 AM
Yay!

planetmonkey
Reply #4 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 10:35 AM
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.

Frogboy
Reply #5 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 11:06 AM

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.


st_nick
Reply #6 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 11:37 AM
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

Aqua.
Reply #7 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 2:41 PM
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

WOM
Reply #8 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 7:20 PM
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.

Drop125
Reply #9 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 8:17 PM
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..

Mackintosh
Reply #10 Wednesday, September 10, 2003 10:57 PM
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

nocool
Reply #11 Thursday, September 11, 2003 8:36 AM
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.

bussie
Reply #12 Thursday, September 11, 2003 9:06 AM
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.....


Frogboy
Reply #13 Thursday, September 11, 2003 10:20 AM
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.

jark
Reply #14 Thursday, September 11, 2003 5:41 PM
what exactly is this technology that you speak of?

Napalm(tm) by deviantART can do much more for ya than any bandwidth compression techniques!

nocool
Reply #15 Thursday, September 11, 2003 6:06 PM
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

souldier
Reply #16 Thursday, September 11, 2003 6:42 PM
You guys are the bomb.

brazil
Reply #17 Thursday, September 11, 2003 11:51 PM
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.

Frogboy
Reply #18 Friday, September 12, 2003 10:40 AM

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


Zodiaq~
Reply #19 Saturday, September 13, 2003 11:44 PM
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...

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