[geeklog-devel] Reducing the number of HTTP requests

[Dirk Haun]

While hunting down some profile spammers, I noticed (not for the first time) that it does take quite a lot of HTTP requests to load the Geeklog homepage.

Below is a list of what it takes to load and display our homepage. These are real numbers, grep'ed from the web server log file just now. First column is a timestamp, followed by the URL and the number of bytes sent.

That's 34 HTTP requests. Note that it takes a full six seconds to send everything (1 second to render the page, then 5 seconds until the last resource has been requested). That's not exactly a great response time, to put it mildly. This will get better on subsequent pages, when the browser caches things. But 6 seconds is what it takes for a first-time visitor.

(The visitor came from a DSL line and the server wasn't busy at the time)

I see a few obvious things (why are we loading the CSS for polls and captcha on the front page?) and a few potential fixes (merge JavaScript files; maybe also some of the images).

Other ideas?

bye, Dirk


--- snip ---
16:20:43 / (11012)
16:20:44 /layout/modern_curve/style.css.php?dir=ltr (59466)
16:20:45 /polls/style.css (1538)
16:20:45 /captcha/style.css (684)
16:20:45 /forum/forum/layout/forum.css (3256)
16:20:45 /layout/modern_curve/images/logo.png (16336)
16:20:45 /javascript/common.js (4244)
16:20:45 /forum/smilies.css.php (1828)
16:20:45 /javascript/jquery.min.js (92923)
16:20:45 /layout/modern_curve/javascript/fix_html.js (1435)
16:20:45 /layout/modern_curve/javascript/confirm.js (501)
16:20:46 /layout/modern_curve/javascript/search.js (1076)
16:20:47 /images/facebook-login-icon.png (845)
16:20:47 /images/twitter-login-icon.png (911)
16:20:47 /images/openid_login_icon.png (812)
16:20:47 /layout/modern_curve/images/print.png (756)
16:20:48 /images/topics/announcements.png (3847)
16:20:48 /images/topics/plugins.png (2717)
16:20:48 /images/buttons/download.png (6977)
16:20:48 /docs/images/de.png (694)
16:20:48 /docs/images/pl.png (631)
16:20:48 /docs/images/jp.png (641)
16:20:48 /docs/images/fr.png (675)
16:20:48 /docs/images/es.png (687)
16:20:48 /javascript/fix_tooltips.js (1596)
16:20:48 /javascript/login.js (1082)
16:20:48 /layout/modern_curve/images/css/bg.png (587)
16:20:48 /layout/modern_curve/images/css/bg_header.png (485)
16:20:48 /layout/modern_curve/images/css/menu_bg.png (466)
16:20:48 /layout/modern_curve/images/css/block_bg.png (577)
16:20:49 /layout/modern_curve/images/css/search-right.png (6671)
16:20:49 /images/buttons/feed.png (896)
16:20:49 /layout/modern_curve/images/button_help.png (532)
16:20:49 /layout/modern_curve/images/favicon.ico (1429)


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