Slow loading Ajax

[3sharp]

This is currently a ticket that i have submitted but was just wondering if anyone else has experienced an issue with this.

Our filtered products, using ajax, loads very slowly. I have investigated into this and the filters seems to return every product to the screen and then after the resources have loaded apply a style="display:none;" to all the products that don't correspond with the filter. The issue probably won't be noticed if there are only a few products on the website however we have decided to use the filtering on all of our products so at present we have 600+ images loading onto the webpage before the ajax applys the style to the unwanted images. I have done a page speed test which notified me that the page (uncached) takes 80 seconds to load and 18 seconds (cached) to load. With googles new 3 second guidline this isn't very seo friendly or consumer friendly. Has anyone seen this before?

Thanks

[peblaco]

You said 18 / 80 seconds which is excessive, guessing the problem might be image sizes. What size images are you using - are you using the Product Page with summaries and a product thumbnail image?. Or have you only filled in the main product image? if so the page might be loading 600 products with large image files and heavily increase the bandwidth of the page.

[3sharp]

Thank you firstly for your reply, I have done quiet alot of research into why the issue was happening including looking at the size of resources, headers, enabling keep-alive ect. and the 600+ images are the main issue being the images that are been downloaded. The images firstly aren't optimised for web which would dramatically increase the speed of the website. However still even if a 90kb image is decreased down to 30kb with cutting it down by a 3rd this still will only reduce loading time down to 6 seconds and 26.6r seconds which as you would imagine over a broadband connection is still exceptionally bad. With google implementing the 3 second load time rule everything is cruical and loading additional resource is out of the question especially with them being hidden after. Just seems like a daft way to go about things. Why not just return what is needed, and rather then changing all static pages to cgi-bin urls, why not use the static page as a template with a javascript AJAX script to query the cgi-bin.

[Mike Hughes]

I agree it's a daft way to do it. Particularly with so many products.

I'm hoping, not having been able to get to any of the recent sellerdeck conferences, that this is a temporary solution until the move to a proper database on the backend.

The trouble with temporary, quick fix, solutions is that they're never quite right and nearly always take a lot of fiddling to try and sort out immediate problems. Slow loading times with lots of products and SEO are two that immediately come to mind.

In the meantime, if you want to get your site working at a reasonable speed then image optimisation and the fixes Louise has mentioned sounds like the best approach.

How un-optimised are the images? Correct sizing and compression can often save between 10x and 100x the bandwidth.

Mike

[3sharp]

Lets face it sellerdeck won't upgrade to an online database. Their software creates static content from an offline database there not going to re-engineer their software. With regards images. Images are 80kb correct size but haven't been compressed which would knock the image down to 25kb saving 55kb. if we base the average image on 80kb with 600 images thats 48000kb which equates to 46.875. With compression thats 15000 equating to 14mb. Even if the image sizes where 10kb each this would still be just under 5mb of resources when only 1.3mb of the data is needed thats a 4 times more then needed. I have currently got a ticket raised with sellerdeck regarding this issue. I have even asked them for the ajax documentation to try and sus this out however upon looking there isn't anything that would hand just the required details. Anything done serverside to wipe out the resource instead of outputting the resource would still add more overhead (obveously not as much). A correct script that does only as it's told would be great.

[Hugh Gibson]

Liam, I dug into support and found the ticket you raised, and then went to your site.

There is something very strange about your markup that is causing very big delays downloading small images. There is even a delay when just returning to a page and reloading the images from cache. The problem is not in loading the filtering information from the server.

I suspected your semantic markup.

You also have an interesting filtering structure that I want to see in the site snapshot, particularly to understand the "Gifts for Her" page.

Regarding the other comments: What is a database? A collection of data. We have that on the website, in a structured association of keys and values. We use that to drive filtering and it works very quickly when it's set up correctly.

[NormanRouxel]

Looking at http://www.personalised-gifts-engraved.com/acatalog/.

You are loading a 1.2 MEGABYTE Act_section_tree.js which won't help. This is being used for an outdated JavaScript based way of displaying your left-hand navigation. You're only displaying the top-level links so that huge file is a waste of bandwidth. Replace that with a simple set of links and you'll save a lot of page load time.

[peblaco]

Is that the right website, didn't see a link posted and can't see a filtered page with the number of products specified. If it was for the sports site that had some serious upgrade issues that could be affecting the filtering speed, see here.

[3sharp]

Looking at http://www.personalised-gifts-engraved.com/acatalog/.

You are loading a 1.2 MEGABYTE Act_section_tree.js which won't help. This is being used for an outdated JavaScript based way of displaying your left-hand navigation. You're only displaying the top-level links so that huge file is a waste of bandwidth. Replace that with a simple set of links and you'll save a lot of page load time.

the website is http://www.englishpewter.co.uk/cgi-b...&Action=Search which is the main page i have run the tests on

[3sharp]

Is that the right website, didn't see a link posted and can't see a filtered page with the number of products specified. If it was for the sports site that had some serious upgrade issues that could be affecting the filtering speed, see here.

The sports site, turns out we have to export the content into a brand new website. Then redesign using the new layouts

[3sharp]

Unfortunately, sellerdeck team has advised that there is a bug in our current site and it's rather difficult to trace as we have massive amounts of copy layouts, Also we are then implementing the Filtering (after this issue is sorted out) which with out using a new layout the filtering only worked on one level and not in sub-sub-sections. Its not that much of an issue as we are redesigning anyway.

[peblaco]

For the original topic of the site with the slow filtering, yes that is pretty drastic for the first load it took my browser about half a minute before it even went to the page and then a few more seconds to load the filtering. And one of the pages pointed out above seems to take ages loading hundreds of products and then reverts to only show one, I'm not sure that is working correctly. It could be a problem specific to the setup on your site or server.

[3sharp]

For the original topic of the site with the slow filtering, yes that is pretty drastic for the first load it took my browser about half a minute before it even went to the page and then a few more seconds to load the filtering. And one of the pages pointed out above seems to take ages loading hundreds of products and then reverts to only show one, I'm not sure that is working correctly. It could be a problem specific to the setup on your site or server.

The CTO has seen this post and is looking into this so i will reply once i have further details to advise if it is our site or a fix that is needed.