AW: Making w3.org much faster

Dear Ian,

Maybe it would be possible to use browser sniffing for the mobile devices?

Concerning the CSS sprites file it was a hard decision for us which graphics we give into the sprites file and which not.
Especially for around 100 country flags that we use on pages like this:
http://www.finanznachrichten.de/nachrichten-medien/uebersicht.htm

As you can see in our sprites file, we have finally included around the top-20 flags.
And all icons - except of the calendar icon that we only use in our advanced search
http://www.finanznachrichten.de/suche/uebersicht.htm - are in the sprites file.

At the end we used Yahoo's Smush.it http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ and Google's Page Speed http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/ to
optimize the size of the files (without losing quality).

So, as a first step it would make sense to analyze the traffic and which graphic files are loaded how often.
I could imagine that it may make sense to have 1 general CSS sprites file + a second one for specific parts of the website, e.g. for
http://validator.w3.org .

I am sure that this effort (3-10 working days depending on the CMS) will lead to a clearly visible increase of speed + reduction of
server load.

Best regards,

FINANZNACHRICHTEN.DE
Markus Meister

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-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Ian Jacobs [mailto:ij@w3.org] 
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 3. August 2011 13:27
An: FinanzNachrichten.de, Markus Meister
Cc: site-comments@w3.org
Betreff: Re: Making w3.org much faster


On 3 Aug 2011, at 2:48 AM, FinanzNachrichten.de, Markus Meister wrote:

> Dear Ian,
> 
> When I visit the homepage, there are a lot of (unnecessary) http-requests.
> 
> Firebug currently shows me 35 requests of which 4 are tiny CSS files.
> It would make sense to have 1 big CSS file instead. This would save 3 requests. From my experience 1 request with 1 byte costs at
> least the same load time as additional 10 kB in an file (using ADSL - depending on the bandwidth it can even be worse).

Hi Markus,

Thank you for the comments. We have considered "one big css" but prefer to keep them separate to better address the diversity of
mobile devices.

> 
> There are 28 graphic files.
> I am sure that it would be possible to put at least 3/4 of them into a CSS sprite file, e.g. the logo, the icons, etc.

Yes, we could (and should) do that.

> 
> Here you can see what happens during loading of the homepage on the First View and a Repeated View:
> http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110803_1F_17GF4/
> 
> With the CSS files put together in 1 file and the often used graphics put together in 1 CSS sprite file, the number of
http-requests
> should be around 10 and the load time will be down from nearly 2 seconds to 1 second.

Thanks for the detailed investigation!

> 
> In the Repeat View you can see many 304s as there is a caching error that should be fixed as well.
> This would then bring down the second visit to 1-3 http-requests and would make the page ultra-fast!!
> 
> Further to that convenience for users, the servers would have less work as there are less http-requests which may lead to cost
> savings.

I appreciate the help and expect we will devote some time to the CSS sprite work (when we can prioritize it).

Ian

> 
> Best regards,
> 
> FINANZNACHRICHTEN.DE
> Markus Meister
> 
> -------------------------------------------
> http://www.finanznachrichten.de
> Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Finanzen
> -------------------------------------------
> DER SPEKULANT - Der Börsenbrief für clevere Investoren 
> http://www.derspekulant.ch
> -------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2011 14:25:29 UTC