Optimizing site load time

bodzan

Hello all, I have a question about a problem that have never occurred to me before: optimizing site...

Well, basically I have this site on http://www.bestevaertc.com that takes some time to load and basically my boss wants me to improve it's speed...
The main issue they are complaining about is that when a user clicks on a link it takes some time to start loading a new page from scratch...

So, now I have to solve this problem but I cannot tell if it is a PHP problem or server problem or something else...

Few things came to mind when thinking this over and over again: number of HTTP requests - (made to external pages like CSS, JS, images and stuff), size of files on the server, extensive use of simple SQL queries opposite to more complex ones with JOINing tables and such, use of old MySQL 3.xx version of database server...

But I cannot find the main or most probable reason for the behavior I explained earlier...

Any thoughts?

Weedpacket

Skipping all the possibilities you have raised...

Have you checked to see that the server itself is physically up to the job? Is it fast enough, and does it have enough bandwidth to serve the page quickly? The way some of the images creep along is suspicious (then again I think you could probably halve the size of Cover00.jpg without it degrading too much). The index page alone (counting images and .js files and other such things that ought to be cached client-side) totals over 236kB. And that is a lot.

Have you checked the quality of the output code? (You try to link to BTC.css three times in the course of the first page, but two of them are invalid. That makes for at least one wasted request/response transaction.)

And for one of the pages, there appears on the left this list:

Gifts and Premiums

Wall clocks
Desktop art. with clock
Penholders
Notepads
Phone stand
Memo blocks
Flex
Cash plate
Ashtrays
Mugmats
Letter openers
Thermometers
Gifts sets
Pens
Lighters
/quote Were you aware that rendering just that list involves over 60kB of HTML? That's two-thirds of the whole page, and includes things like "<nobr><img src="images/spacer.gif" align="absbottom" border="0" height="10" hspace="0" vspace="0" width="50">" just to indent a row. (Incidentally, you might want to check your language mechanism; it gets confused sometimes.) And simply does not work without Javascript. So simplistic database querying of an old dbms (though I understand MySQL 3 was pretty fast - sacrificing data integrity for select speed, it has to be said), bloated HTML, and a possibly slow connection.... it quite possibly would take a while.

Sorry if I come across as harsh in that. I'm only going on the necessarily limited experience I've had with the site.

bodzan

That is some insightful info you have for me Weedpacket...

And most of them - if not all of them are very useful!!!

Thanks for them.

To answer you:

No, I haven't tested the server because it is not dedicated and I have no ability to do so - which IMHO might be one of the problems we have... BUT on the other hand I wouldn't be too sure at my skill to know what to look even if I had the ability...
As for images - the designer of those is working for the company and I simply cannot persuade him that he CAN optimize those images a little more with significant result...
This goes true for the menu image menu on the top as well - I tried to tell him that that menu alone would cost us a lot of bandwidth but he insisted on it - so I let it go...
Quality of the code is my main concern and sadly I missed such a important thing as is loading that CSS file three times (!) But in my defense I have to say that mentioned designer works on those pages after I finish with them and often without me knowing it and it seems like when he works on the include pages his Dreamweaver or whichever editor he uses adds that line of code even without him knowing him OR he adds it on purpose - again I cannot persuade him to STOP messing with my code like that...
The list is the main problem for sure - I am aware on that, but if you looked on the pages for category 6 and 8 that list is somewhat fixed and all those images don't load until user mouseover each item in it... I was using AJAX to create that but I didn't want to do that on others since I didn't yet master AJAX perfectly to avoid the situation when user's browser doesn't supports JS... As far as my brain is concerned I will do it in AJAX to avoid the issue...
Thanks for the tip about language mechanism... It is huge and it might have errors in it... I'll check it out...

And finally - no man - you are not harsh at all when it comes to this code - in fact I hoped that you were the one who will help me because of your bluntness and "harsh" approach because that kind of approach is the one I can use here...

Thanks again...

Weedpacket

bodzan wrote:
1. No, I haven't tested the server because it is not dedicated and I have no ability to do so - which IMHO might be one of the problems we have...

Ah, the perennial bane of shared hosting; the performance of your site depends on the popularity and efficiency of every other site hosted on the server and using the same connection to the network.

Glad I could help, though.