Comments on: Tech Bleg

By: Wesley Womack

Wesley Womack — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 17:44:34 +0000

Les Jones,

You’re right about print.css. I somehow missed the media=”print” when I first looked at it.

By: gunner

gunner — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 22:50:45 +0000

I have had a 4-5 second delay to fully load image for a bit also. Nothing that really bothered me so did not mention it.

By: _Jon

_Jon — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:29:40 +0000

Yeah, the link has been slow for a while.

By: Les Jones

Les Jones — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 18:06:57 +0000

Unless the Web browser is pretty braindead, it should only load the print stylesheet when actually printing. And you don’t want to combine the two – one is for output to screen and one is for output to printers.

Anyhoo, I think your speed problems are probably caused by your Web hosting provider or a link on the Internet that’s down. Your Web page didn’t suddenly become slower overnight.

By: SayUncle

SayUncle — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:01:43 +0000

Thanks for the advice. Dunno how to make it stop pulling from one or the other sheet but i did lose the archives script. Also, sent a message to my host regarding response time.

By: Wesley Womack

Wesley Womack — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:45:32 +0000

It looks like my code snippet was cut out of my comment for some reason. My second paragraph was about the script tag that referenced src=”sayuncle_archive.html”.

By: cube

cube — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:45:30 +0000

I just thought it was you.

By: Wesley Womack

Wesley Womack — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:44:26 +0000

Check out http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
It’s a free page I use to check website performance. It can give some hints about ways to increase speed. It’ll give a list of recommendations at the bottom of the results page.

The only really odd thing I saw in your code was the following line:

I’m not sure what that is intended to do but that file returns a 404 not found error so it might be good to cut that from the template.

I also saw that you have two stylesheets being loaded. You’re pulling in both print.css and styles-site.css. Unless there’s a reason for having two you might gain a little bit of speed by consolidating them into css file. The reason I say that is because things loaded in the head of the document usually must be completely loaded before the browser will begin displaying the page.

Also, I agree with the previous commenter. I just ran a get on your home page (using wget) and saw it waiting at “HTTP request sent, awaiting response…” for 4-5 seconds. Once it got a response the speed was fine. I think either it’s a slow server problem, or for some reason the php code is running slowly. I don’t have any experience with wordpress so I don’t know what would be causing that. My assumption is that some script running server side is running slowly.

By: Chris Wage

Chris Wage — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:42:56 +0000

Er, that is, “It looks like”

By: Chris Wage

Chris Wage — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:42:39 +0000

It’s like your server.

It takes over 3 seconds for your server to return a response after the initial request:

$ time HEAD http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2005/06/27/tech_bleg/
200 OK
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:41:44 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Server:
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:41:44 GMT
Client-Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:41:48 GMT
Client-Peer: 63.247.133.128:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Pingback: http://www.saysuncle.com/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10

real 0m3.114s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.013s

By: Ravenwood

Ravenwood — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:39:14 +0000

It’s probably your hosting provider.

By: _Jon

_Jon — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 13:45:37 +0000

There is still a delay.
For me, from Detroit (in an auto company with *huge* ‘net connections), it takes 5-8 seconds to change from “Waiting for saysuncle.com” to “Transferring data from saysuncle.com”.
The transferring data takes between 1 and 2 seconds.