Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Maflynn · Feb 9, 2009, 01:48 PM

I stumbled upon rage software's web crusher I decided to play with it but so far the results are not as much as I hopped. While my iweb site's size has been reduced 40% the speed hasn't really improved.

So this begs the question, does anyone use this, or anything similar? So far I'm less then impressed, but I'd like to know what other's think.

FWIW, I tested my iweb site, and a site I developed using rapidweaver. The rapidweaver site lost some of the formatting I setup and thus made it useless for me.

besson3c · Feb 9, 2009, 02:05 PM

There are many different techniques that can be utilized for improving website performance, but before you do any of this, it is wise to determine whether there are bottlenecks elsewhere such as with your web server. Where is your site hosted?

Maflynn · Feb 9, 2009, 02:12 PM

the intended purpose is for my iweb site, on mobileme

I know that explains a lot because mobileme/iweb can be a bit slow. Irregardless, I found that the "pre-crushed" site took 15 seconds to load the main photo album site and the "post-crushed" site took the same amount of time. I was hoping for a bit faster load times but I'm not seeing any.

besson3c · Feb 9, 2009, 02:14 PM

If your photo album is taking 15 seconds to load, a tool like this is not going to help. Your best bet would be to compress the JPGs smaller (or use JPGs if you are using PNGs), but even then you will only be able to compress JPGs up to a point before you start to see artifacts.

Maflynn · Feb 9, 2009, 02:23 PM

That's one of the functions of the web crusher, it reduced the size of the site from 61 meg to 37 meg and the main album page is just a series of thumbnails each pointing to a web gallery so even then the size of the images shouldn't be a factor in this case. I can see the main photo pages benefitting from compressing the images but overall the main album page wouldn't.

I suspect its poorly written/bloated javascript that's consuming the time and no amount of optimizations will help that. I cannot be sure which is why I posted this thread to see if others use this tool or others like it, especially if they use iweb.

besson3c · Feb 9, 2009, 03:31 PM

Why would you assume that the problem is with Javascript? Javascript is just text, but whether the images are preloaded or loaded on demand they still need to be loaded. It sounds like the only real way to improve upon the performance of your photo galleries is to change how they are designed and structured?

Chuckit · Feb 9, 2009, 03:52 PM

Javascript is not "just text" any more than any other code is. Javascript is code that is parsed and compiled. More importantly, it's done synchronously — so if you have a bunch of it that needs to load before your page content, everything else has to sit there and wait its turn while the Javascript is downloaded and interpreted.

besson3c · Feb 9, 2009, 04:31 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Javascript is not "just text" any more than any other code is. Javascript is code that is parsed and compiled. More importantly, it's done synchronously — so if you have a bunch of it that needs to load before your page content, everything else has to sit there and wait its turn while the Javascript is downloaded and interpreted.

My answer was obviously a simplification, but obviously we can agree that the downloading and even interpreting of JS is not going to be a great bottleneck here. What might be is the rendering of content as faciliated by JS though...