SpeedDemon discussion thread

onethumb · March 17, 2006

In our latest release, we have a new BETA feature called SpeedDemon.

We're anxious to see how you guys like it, and especially, whether it plays nice with all the crazy customization you've done.

So please post your impressions in this thread so we know where to go next.

Thanks!

Don

bwg · March 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

In our latest release, we have a new BETA feature called SpeedDemon.

We're anxious to see how you guys like it, and especially, whether it plays nice with all the crazy customization you've done.

So please post your impressions in this thread so we know where to go next.

Thanks!

Don

brilliant...no probs w/my customization

guess you got around all the hurdles then?

ExposeTheMoment · March 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

In our latest release, we have a new BETA feature called SpeedDemon.

We're anxious to see how you guys like it, and especially, whether it plays nice with all the crazy customization you've done.

So please post your impressions in this thread so we know where to go next.

Thanks!

Don

No problems here.

rainforest1155 · March 17, 2006

I don't see any problems either, but initially had a hard time figuring out what it was you changed, because the pages were all loading so darn fast!

Sebastian

PS: Maybe you should offer a link to turn it off, too. Haven't seen it.

wellman · March 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

In our latest release, we have a new BETA feature called SpeedDemon.

Works great for me, too. I assume this is a per-browser setting and not an account-level setting? In other words, I wasn't logged in when I enabled it. If SpeedDemon receives applause (which it should), would it become "default" behavior such that each person who views my site will get the benefit w/o having to enable it?

Thanks for all the great work, and also thanks for the JPG compression changes!

-Greg

bwg · March 17, 2006

wellman wrote:

Works great for me, too. I assume this is a per-browser setting and not an account-level setting?

ya, it's a browser cookie that triggers it, not an account setting. once you turn it on, it's on for all the smugmug sites you visit w/that browser.

and just some early testing:

flock 0.5.12 works
opera 8.53 works
opera 9 works

DodgeV83 · March 17, 2006

Simply Amazing!!!

onethumb · March 17, 2006

bigwebguy wrote:

brilliant...no probs w/my customization

guess you got around all the hurdles then?

No, I just decided "Screw them, my customers are more important". We'll see how it shakes out...

Don

onethumb · March 17, 2006

rainforest1155 wrote:

PS: Maybe you should offer a link to turn it off, too. Haven't seen it.

Doh, thought I was clear - simply hit the same link twice. It'll toggle off/on each time. Stop when you see a frowny - it's off.

Don

DodgeV83 · March 17, 2006

Is there any code we can put into our site to have this cookie enabled for every visitor?

bwg · March 17, 2006

DodgeV83 wrote:

Is there any code we can put into our site to have this cookie enabled for every visitor?

i would hold off, as don stated in the release notes, this is a public beta. A lot of times during the beta cycle things can change and get wonky (a technical term) without notice.

Probably best to just chill for a while and let the SM team get all the kinks smoothed out.

Mike Lane · March 17, 2006

I'm pretty slow. There are only a couple of things that I can see that changed. First the linked CSS files are now smugmugBlack-324092871042371.css and user_mikelane-110987210982371.css and theme_1190-12047821487109283740.css (the large bunch of numbers in each was just me randomly hitting numbers they don't correspond to anything obviously).

But now, on my page, it loads up with everything except the gallery categories which puts my footer way up high and then loads the gallery categories which pushes the footer down. Maybe I'm being picky and maybe that's just because of how I have my page set up, but damn that's annoying. And how long would my footer be sitting up right underneath my bioBox if someone's viewing my page with a 56k connection?

The other thing that's super hella annoying is that I now have a linked stylesheet AND an embedded stylesheet. That's the only reason I know about this. I was trying to help someone out in the customization forum and went to their now oddly named linked stylesheet in webdev and put in some reasonably straight forward code and ... bam ... nothing happened! What the? Took me a while to figure out that all that code was parroted inline in the embedded CSS tab in webdev. Gah! What a pain! Is that how it's supposed to work? It just seems to me that if you have to load the exact same CSS twice you'd be sending way more info to the browser than you have to thus slowing it down. But maybe I just don't understand this new update.

DavidTO · March 17, 2006

In safari I got an XML error a coupla times, so I shut it off. It wasn't on my site, but another and unfortunately, I forget which one.

onethumb · March 17, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

I'm pretty slow. There are only a couple of things that I can see that changed. First the linked CSS files are now smugmugBlack-324092871042371.css and user_mikelane-110987210982371.css and theme_1190-12047821487109283740.css (the large bunch of numbers in each was just me randomly hitting numbers they don't correspond to anything obviously).

But now, on my page, it loads up with everything except the gallery categories which puts my footer way up high and then loads the gallery categories which pushes the footer down. Maybe I'm being picky and maybe that's just because of how I have my page set up, but damn that's annoying. And how long would my footer be sitting up right underneath my bioBox if someone's viewing my page with a 56k connection?

You'd rather have your 56k customer sit there at a blank browser page twiddling their thumbs for 5 seconds than have the page pop up in less than a second and then add some elements over the next few seconds?

Re-flowing the page is very common on the web, and general preference (especially by modem browsers) is that pages which show SOMETHING while the rest draws in is preferrable to a blank page & browser throbber.

Since we compress our pages to make them faster for said modem browser, we haven't had the luxury of showing them SOMETHING until now - they'd have to wait for the whole thing so they could decompress it.

Mike Lane wrote:

The other thing that's super hella annoying is that I now have a linked stylesheet AND an embedded stylesheet. That's the only reason I know about this. I was trying to help someone out in the customization forum and went to their now oddly named linked stylesheet in webdev and put in some reasonably straight forward code and ... bam ... nothing happened! What the? Took me a while to figure out that all that code was parroted inline in the embedded CSS tab in webdev. Gah! What a pain! Is that how it's supposed to work? It just seems to me that if you have to load the exact same CSS twice you'd be sending way more info to the browser than you have to thus slowing it down. But maybe I just don't understand this new update.

Come on, you know us better than that. It was a bug. It's fixed.

Don

Mike Lane · March 17, 2006

Yes I most definitely would rather them see something than nothing. And if it's not much of a wait for the 56k-ers (mere seconds) I probably wouldn't mind it staying the way it is. But if it's much longer, maybe we can find a way to make it so the footers (custom and otherwise) are hidden until the gallery/gallery category box is written? If it's too much of a pain though, no problem.

And I didn't know it was a bug

I thought it was part of the new way of doing things or something. I can fake the CSS stuff but the rest is way over my head you guys know that. Glad to see that part is fixed anyhow.

onethumb · March 17, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

Yes I most definitely would rather them see something than nothing. And if it's not much of a wait for the 56k-ers (mere seconds) I probably wouldn't mind it staying the way it is. But if it's much longer, maybe we can find a way to make it so the footers (custom and otherwise) are hidden until the gallery/gallery category box is written? If it's too much of a pain though, no problem.

It's almost exactly the same total time to get everything on the page, it just FEELS lots faster because the browser starts doing stuff. There's feedback to the customer.

Mike Lane wrote:

And I didn't know it was a bug I thought it was part of the new way of doing things or something. I can fake the CSS stuff but the rest is way over my head you guys know that. Glad to see that part is fixed anyhow.

Don

flyingdutchie · March 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

In our latest release, we have a new BETA feature called SpeedDemon.

We're anxious to see how you guys like it, and especially, whether it plays nice with all the crazy customization you've done.

So please post your impressions in this thread so we know where to go next.

Thanks!

Don

My site is customized a 'little'

And I don't see any issues, so far.

What exactly does SpeedDemon do? (i'd like to now, i'm a geek... sometimes)....

It seems that with SpeedDemon on, the CSS and Javascript are inline instead of externally linked.
Is this faster? I though that caching the CSS and JavaScript would be faster....

Andy · March 17, 2006

flyingdutchie wrote:

My site is customized a 'little'

Above quote nominated for "understatement of the millenium!"

W.W. Webster · March 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

In our latest release, we have a new BETA feature called SpeedDemon.

We're anxious to see how you guys like it, and especially, whether it plays nice with all the crazy customization you've done.

Speed Demon runs for my site runs without apparent problems with Firefox 1.5, but with Safari 2.0.3 I get:

After I clear this by clicking 'OK', I get:

This appears to never go away. I haven't tried other browsers at this stage.

Is this a known bug?

W.W. Webster · March 17, 2006

Problem with OmniWeb?

W.W. Webster wrote:

I haven't tried other browsers at this stage.

Tried Omniweb 5.1.3 and found it doesn't display the categories box on my homepage. In all other respects, both the page and the rest of the site appear to run fine. Weird!

Andy · March 17, 2006

W.W. Webster wrote:

Tried Omniweb 5.1.3 and found it doesn't display the categories box on my homepage. In all other respects, both the page and the rest of the site appear to run fine. Weird!

W.W. Webster wrote:

Speed Demon runs for my site runs without apparent problems with Firefox 1.5, but with Safari 2.0.3 I get:

After I clear this by clicking 'OK', I get:

This appears to never go away. I haven't tried other browsers at this stage.
Is this a known bug?

Ross, please see the release notes:

release notes wrote:

If all goes well, we’ll enable it by default for browsers which support it in the near future. Currently that’s IE6 and Firefox. It’s possible, but doubtful, that other browsers will be enabled. Please let us know if some other browser DOES work so we know to enable it.

W.W. Webster · March 17, 2006

Andy wrote:

Ross, please see the release notes

Andy

I had seen the notes but hadn't noticed that Safari was explicitly not supported. Feedback in an earlier previous post from BWG was that Speed Demon appeared to be compatible with three other browsers.

I'm sure the powers-that-be are across the main issues, but I thought it could be helpful to add my experience with some other browsers exhibiting problems, particularly since the errant behaviour differs from browser to browser. I have also found some other browsers with which Speed Demon seems to operate correctly.

Andy · March 17, 2006

W.W. Webster wrote:

Andy

I had seen the notes but hadn't noticed that Safari was explicitly not supported. Feedback in an earlier previous post from BWG was that Speed Demon appeared to be compatible with three other browsers.

I'm sure the powers-that-be are across the main issues, but I thought it could be helpful to add my experience with some other browsers exhibiting problems, particularly since the errant behaviour differs from browser to browser. I have also found some other browsers with which Speed Demon seems to operate correctly.

No problemo, Ross - I wanted you to be sure that Don's only saying it officially works with IE and FF now. We'll happily take any and all feedback on any browsers though, keep it coming!

Cheers!

mbrady · March 20, 2006

I've got to admit that I've tried Speed Demon turned on and off in both Firefox and IE but I don't see what it's doing different. I'm connecting through DSL, is the speed difference more noticable for dial-up?

Matt

onethumb · March 20, 2006

mbrady wrote:

I've got to admit that I've tried Speed Demon turned on and off in both Firefox and IE but I don't see what it's doing different. I'm connecting through DSL, is the speed difference more noticable for dial-up?

Matt

The more important factor is how complicated your homepage is. If you have hundreds or thousands of galleries, hundreds of friends & family, or tons of keywords, you should notice a decent speed boost.

If, on the other hand, you only have a few of any of the above, it'll be roughly the same.

Don

mbrady · March 20, 2006

onethumb wrote:

The more important factor is how complicated your homepage is. If you have hundreds or thousands of galleries, hundreds of friends & family, or tons of keywords, you should notice a decent speed boost.

If, on the other hand, you only have a few of any of the above, it'll be roughly the same.

Don

Thanks for the explanation. That probably explains it. I have a pretty small site with only minor customization.

Mike Lane · March 25, 2006

Okay, I'm embracing the speedDemon:D I've noticed that for a split second there is a loading graphic for the speedDemon. I'm assuming there is something similar to the ajaxWorking layers or maybe the lightbox Stage or cart Stage that I can customize to prevent my footer from crashing into my featuredBox. But, I'm certainly not quick enough to view the source at just the right time to catch it and I'm too dumb to understand the javascript enough to pull it from there.

sooooo... What is the rendered html for that part? Also are there any other things of that nature that I can customize that I may not realize exist?

bwg · March 25, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

Okay, I'm embracing the speedDemon:D I've noticed that for a split second there is a loading graphic for the speedDemon. I'm assuming there is something similar to the ajaxWorking layers or maybe the lightbox Stage or cart Stage that I can customize to prevent my footer from crashing into my featuredBox. But, I'm certainly not quick enough to view the source at just the right time to catch it and I'm too dumb to understand the javascript enough to pull it from there.

sooooo... What is the rendered html for that part? Also are there any other things of that nature that I can customize that I may not realize exist?

awww c'mon mike. it's using ajax, so the page you see when you view source isn't what your browser is actually rendering...

that baby must be messing with your brain already

Mike Lane · March 25, 2006

bigwebguy wrote:

awww c'mon mike. it's using ajax, so the page you see when you view source isn't what your browser is actually rendering...

that baby must be messing with your brain already

Are the ajax working layer, the cartstage, and the lightbox stage not using something similar? Is there then no way to customize the speed demon loading stuff then?

bwg · March 25, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

Are the ajax working layer, the cartstage, and the lightbox stage not using something similar? Is there then no way to customize the speed demon loading stuff then?

i guess i was too discrete.

view source man...look for id's that start with AJAX

Mike Lane · March 26, 2006

bigwebguy wrote:

i guess i was too discrete.

view source man...look for id's that start with AJAX

Oh geeze, I never would have thought of that.

Dude seriously, I've done that a bunch of times. What I come up with is ajaxWorking which as you obviously know is the green loading box and that's it. Like I was getting at, obviously there is a div that handles this sort of thing but like other things it's only generated in the source as needed apparently. And since it is speeddemon after all, I can't seem to view the source at the right time to see it because I'm slow.

So, onethumb, jt, ben, baldy, andy, anyone with a straight answer, how can I customize the speedDemon ajax?

Thanks.

SpeedDemon discussion thread

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