Comments on: Royal Pingdom Says Our Load Times Suck, And So Do Those Of Most Other Big Blogs

By: Royal Pingdom Says Our Load Times Suck, And So Do Those Of Most Other Big Blogs « Weblibraryjpn’s Weblog

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:09:16 +0000

[...] a comment » Royal Pingdom Says Our Load Times Suck, And So Do Those Of Most Other Big Blogs(November 5, 2008　TechCrunch)　 As blogs grow and try to cram more and more stuff on their [...]

By: Stebe

Stebe — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:16:15 +0000

Remove the adds, blog network cross promotion stuff and actually thumbnail the images in the blog posts and things would be way better.

By: Dmitry Chestnykh

Dmitry Chestnykh — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:08:22 +0000

Yslow report for this page: http://i37.tiny...com/1zefbpe.png

Performance Grade: F (30)

Unbelievable. Blame bulky WordPress plugins (1, 5, 6, 9, 10), wrong server configuration (3, 4, 13), and ads (1, 3, 9).

Especially scary: when you go to this page you’re loading stuff from 18 different domains (see 9).

Drop me a note if you want suggestions on how to get rid of some stuff (I’ve just went thought for one of my WordPress sites) — I will be happy to help.

By: bang

bang — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:58:37 +0000

How many people here actually click on a snap shot? The click through rates must be awful

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:04:08 +0000

Nice affiliate Hostgator link *rollseyes*

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:02:51 +0000

Agreed – assuming they add a significant amount, I’d happily see them go.

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:15:45 +0000

I like the snapshots

By: JoshFinnie

JoshFinnie — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:26:03 +0000

@berrystone – You forgot your blog link…

By: Young

Young — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:38:03 +0000

Just to keep your site as simple and clear as it should be.

By: Harry Nuts

Harry Nuts — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:00:32 +0000

Just get rid of all the shite ads on the home page and the load times will increase.

Easy.

The consultancy bill is in the post.

oh wait…Folks… thats not gonna happen. Just use adblock!

By: Harry Seldon

Harry Seldon — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:51:40 +0000

They have pretty charts. Out of curiosity, anyone knows how they are made (which charting library) ?

Else if this analysis could lead to an improve of blogs loading time, that would be nice.

By: helping business in flintshire » Web Download Problems show a Broadband Divide

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:47:51 +0000

[...] The full story is here, but what isn’t explained in the article is why, if the size of the page is such an issue, are these highlighted sites still in the Top 100 sites visited on the internet? The logical answer would be that these was a link between the site of your site, and the number of visitors you had. Anyone think this may be a non story? No Related Post [...]

By: Branden

Branden — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:16:46 +0000

I don’t think 500KB is really that bad to be honest. I think the problem you should really be concerned with is why is bandwidth in the US so damn slow compared to other countries. Why should sites limit their user experience because the US is slugging compared to the world in bandwidth speeds. 500KB won’t be anything once Comcast rolls out their double speed packages for the same price, + 22 Mbps Ultra speeds, + 50 Mbps. Then you’ve got to consider Sprint + Clearwire is getting into the game too so that will help increase the speed or competition.

Overall lets move forward with high quality image content, video content, and cool scripts. If your on 300kbps or less it’s time to upgrade people.

I would like to note though when sites list out 50 posts on one page it is a little hectic so lets use some proper content management as well shall we.

By: maestroalberto » Qunto “pesano” i 100 più importanti siti della blogosfera?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:17:58 +0000

[...] | Techcrunch Tags: blogging, blogosfera, firefox, grafici, informazioni, news, plugin, ranking, seo, [...]

By: physio

physio — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:03:40 +0000

I couldn’t agree more. Snap Shots are as annoying as pop up ads. Please kill them. TechCrunch loads painfully slow (relatively speaking) even on broadband. It’s embarrassing that a site which is supposed to be so leading edge crawls when you visit it. Maybe a 5th column of ads would help.

By: Nabil Laoudji

Nabil Laoudji — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:13:33 +0000

One woraround is to use the iPhone-optimized Google Reader site. This way you only load the content you want.

By: Celebrati

Celebrati — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:02:44 +0000

Remove snapshots. That will help a lot – I tried them recently on our website recently and the slowdown I experienced outweighed the functionality of that feature. It is probably good on a page with 1-2 external links but not on TC’s front page where there are tons of them.

By: Jeff Bonforte

Jeff Bonforte — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:46:52 +0000

Plus you crash my iPhone browser (as does Engadget, Huffington Post, etc). For me, it is the ads…not sure why they are so heavy and so slow to serve.

By: Booty Patrol

Booty Patrol — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:02:06 +0000

Too bad Royal Pingdom can’t measure how much your content sucks.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:26:03 +0000

Wrong; images on a external domain will be faster. The average browser limits the requests to a certain domain, so having some resources on another domain will speed up the loading of a page. If you had 40 resources (css/js/images) on a page, and split them between 10 domains (even served from the same server), you would have a faster page than serving all 40 from the same domain. Never tested it to see if the speed improvements would be worth it, but in theory it would be faster.

Its great your interested phototristan, but you seem to me like you think you know a lot, when in fact you are completely misinformed on how HTTP and related technologies work.

By: sam

sam — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:19:44 +0000

look…

way back in the day. we dealt/talked about this at akamai. if you don’t give a damn about your readers, you keep soing what you’re doing now.

if you do care about your readers, and the fact that ads/3rd party apps are screwing up their load times, then you might try to find a system that more or less does a local cache of all the static “stuff” your site pulls in from other sites/apps.

if nothing like this exists, then there you go, you’ve now got an idea for a biz to speed up the fetching of the data from the 3rd party sites, via a local proxy kind of server….

matter of fact… might be an interesting little project to put together!!!

-peace

By: chickerino

chickerino — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:42:33 +0000

Soooooo right. And the most important thing and often biggest bottleneck (especially on highly trafficked sites) is the server-side render time of the page. This is the part where the web application is making all the calls to the database and doing all the clever stuff to build the page even before the *first* byte is sent to the browser.

I’d say that actual page size (including graphics) is 3rd behind this and other super simple things like turning on gzip on the server and setting the expiry tags on all of the js/css/images. Use YSlow to work out what’s missing.

By: Jared Schnelle

Jared Schnelle — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:39:00 +0000

Another option to help speed up the site is to group your small images (16×16 icons) which usually have about 4KB size into a sprite sheet. Do a search for sprite sheet CSS and you’ll understand what I mean. For site with such heavy traffic, this might actually help

By: Jared Schnelle

Jared Schnelle — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:35:56 +0000

If you have Firefox, download the Firebug extension. Then click on the little bug in the lower right corner and go to the “Net” tab. If “Net” monitoring is enabled, you can see the individual files and a sum of all load times.

The TC homepage for me is:
52 requests – 707 KB – (659 KB from cache) – 2.73s

By: CharliWag

CharliWag — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:11:18 +0000

Agreed