Ack! PBase is faster than smugmug.

BaldyBaldy Registered Users, Super Moderators Posts: 2,853 moderator
edited April 30, 2005 in SmugMug Support
From time to time we get roughed up in forums as we have in the past few days a dpreview about speed.

When we chase this down we almost always find a bad case of

19544602-L.gif

Yesterday while responding to complaints I discovered custom banners that ranged from 100 KB (very common) to 1.9 MB. A 56K modem user who lands on one of your pages that has a 100 KB banner will feel they've run into a concrete wall. It will take them at least 17 seconds to see the banner. Correction: they won't see the banner because they'll be gone before it displays. It's bigger (byte-wise) than all the rest of the photos on the page combined.

When making a banner, the best way to optimize its size is with Adobe's Save for Web command. Make sure the ICC profile box is not checked (it's just dead weight for banners) and if you save as JPEG, the quality is not set higher than 60, which is plenty high for online display.

And the taller the banner ... the bigger it is byte-wise, and the more your users will have to scroll vertically, which they are allergic to.

Here's a forum post with more info:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=13042810

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Baldy
My Smug Mug

Comments

  • NikolaiNikolai Registered Users Posts: 19,035 Major grins
    edited April 12, 2005
    Interesting... Thanks!
    I checked mine and shrank it from 35 to 16K:-)
    WTG, Chris!
    "May the f/stop be with you!"
  • CameronCameron Registered Users Posts: 745 Major grins
    edited April 30, 2005
    Baldy wrote:
    And the taller the banner ... the bigger it is byte-wise, and the more your users will have to scroll vertically, which they are allergic to.
    Sorry for digging up an older thread, but how big can the banner be before it scrolls on a 1024x768 fullscreen browser window? I read in another thread that smugmug has made their banner smaller over time due to scrolling complaints. Just curious.
    Photos
  • K.VanK.Van Registered Users Posts: 17 Big grins
    edited April 30, 2005
    Baldy wrote:
    From time to time we get roughed up in forums as we have in the past few days a dpreview about speed.

    When we chase this down we almost always find a bad case of

    19544602-L.gif

    Yesterday while responding to complaints I discovered custom banners that ranged from 100 KB (very common) to 1.9 MB. A 56K modem user who lands on one of your pages that has a 100 KB banner will feel they've run into a concrete wall. It will take them at least 17 seconds to see the banner. Correction: they won't see the banner because they'll be gone before it displays. It's bigger (byte-wise) than all the rest of the photos on the page combined.

    When making a banner, the best way to optimize its size is with Adobe's Save for Web command. Make sure the ICC profile box is not checked (it's just dead weight for banners) and if you save as JPEG, the quality is not set higher than 60, which is plenty high for online display.

    And the taller the banner ... the bigger it is byte-wise, and the more your users will have to scroll vertically, which they are allergic to.

    Here's a forum post with more info:

    http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=13042810

    I hope this helps.

    Thanks,
    Baldy

    Make sense for the main gallery page but what about speed in general?

    It takes an average of 35 seconds to load my sales details bear in mind this is the time it takes to GET to the page i.e I sit at the control panel for 35 seconds befor the sales page appears and starts downloading (tried from 3 different connections DSL 1.5 to DS3).

    Sometimes it takes 10 to 15 seconds to get directly to the control panel (this is my bookmarked entry to my account). Fortunately my coustomers don't see these delays.

    Any chance they're going to streamline the sales section? Maybe split it into paid and not paid.
  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited April 30, 2005
    K.Van wrote:
    Make sense for the main gallery page but what about speed in general?

    It takes an average of 35 seconds to load my sales details bear in mind this is the time it takes to GET to the page i.e I sit at the control panel for 35 seconds befor the sales page appears and starts downloading (tried from 3 different connections DSL 1.5 to DS3).

    Sometimes it takes 10 to 15 seconds to get directly to the control panel (this is my bookmarked entry to my account). Fortunately my coustomers don't see these delays.

    Any chance they're going to streamline the sales section? Maybe split it into paid and not paid.

    Neither of those pages are optimized for speed, nor is that really a priority.

    Instead, they're optimized for getting the most useful information into your hands as possible. We could rapidly speed up the control panel if we didn't give you all the useful information there, like your comments, bandwidth used, photos uploaded, etc.

    We decided that those stats are useful enough to cause a few seconds delay (I'm only seeing 2-3 seconds for my control panel), particularly because they're not hit millions of times a day (like gallery pages are) and aren't seen by your customers.

    Bottom line: both pages have a *lot* of work going behind the scenes, relatively speaking, so they'll continue to be marginally slower than photos & galleries.

    Don
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