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How to Speed up Vanillicons

422422 MVP
edited December 2011 in Feedback
They seem to really interfere with page load across this forum, seemingly.. you are firing off a ping for each icon that needs to be displayed, but these are being done sequentially.. meaning if there are 20 users on the site.. it appears there isnt any cache control over page refresh, so each time i refresh say the discussions home page .. the actual webpage can take minutes to load properly, and never fully load on mobile device such as iPad.

I have no idea how you are using this plugin, its not something we need or use, albeit I think its cool.. it really is strting to annoy me whilst on here.
We havent got the fastest internet connection in the world. But seemingly the fetch time of icons is ridiculously high.

Have you considered using getimage and whilst I see you are scaling the icons for the sidebar you could also store those as thumbs at a lower scale, say 70% file size.

We use this to great effect on our master site, and whilst not perfect helps tremendously.

Also perhaps limit the cache refresh of icons.

Another gripe is, the forum software in general really needs to adopt a "generic icon" for users with no avatar.

Just a few thoughts, like I said Im not up on "your" mechanics, but I guess the devs must have looked at this a few times and thought... hmmmm

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Answers

  • aidsteraidster New
    you may want to check this plugin out...

    http://www.goodoldmemories.com/2011/11/wavatar-plugin-for-vanilla-2-0-18/

    the avatar images are generated and cached in your your server.
  • 422422 MVP
    I dont want to use any plugin, thanks for the info though. We use our own user system fully integrated into vanilla. My question pertains to the vanilla forums only

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  • aidsteraidster New
    oh my bad, i didn't read carefully, thought you're having problem with vanillicon's avatar loading on a slow internet connection. please ignore my previous comment.
  • 422422 MVP
    Thats ok

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  • ddumontddumont ✭✭
    I think what they need is some image sprites, might be an easy project to start working on. define some css classes and group some images together. would make a world of difference in load times.

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  • 422422 MVP
    Are you noticing the lag too ?

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  • 422422 MVP
    image sprites would be ridiculously difficult to maintain. Specifically for user icons. But the whos online array could propogate using json in the footer, and refresh every few minutes..

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  • ddumontddumont ✭✭
    oh you meant in who's online. yeah nevermind.

    serving them up with a 1yr cache would be ideal. make a version string so if the user changes their icon it will update but won't ask for modified each time it loads. I'd make a ticket for it. good performance gain.

    anwyay... sprites for forum images (icons and such) would also help

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  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    Did you guys even look at the network activity before commenting here?

    image
    image
    image

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    As for sprites:

    Theme sprites (design/images/sprites.png):
    image

    Bookmark sprites (design/images/star_sprite.png):
    image

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • LincLinc Admin
    Another gripe is, the forum software in general really needs to adopt a "generic icon" for users with no avatar.
    I think it's pretty clear we've voted against that. :)
  • 422422 MVP
    I find the network activity you posted above amazing, m not here whinging , its a genuine issue for my enjoyment of the forums. In this thread for example, it took twenty seven seconds to load the last three icons of the whos online sidebar block.

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  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    What browser are you using?

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • 422422 MVP
    edited November 2011
    Heres network activity , Firefox latest. This is network activity for vanillaforums.org/discussions
    image

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  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    When you reload, do some of those "200 OK" turn into "304 Not Modified"?

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    And not force reload, just normal (Cmd+R on mac, F5 on PC)

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • 422422 MVP
    edited November 2011
    One mo will check, but I dont think so.

    Ctrl + F5
    image

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  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    I only have 4 '200 OK' requests:

    1) The actual HTML document
    2) A subsequent AJAX request
    3) Another AJAX request
    4) Google Analytics

    The rest are 304 Not Modified, and one 302 from Facebook for someone's avatar. Perhaps your browser is configured wrongly and isn't caching.

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • 422422 MVP
    edited November 2011
    Weird, we have 430 users online on one of our sites ( not a forum ) at the moment, and our net load on the page is :
    1.2 MB

    (820.2 KB from cache)
    13.42s (onload: 10.75s)

    Not a single bad request... not that that has anything to do with it.

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  • TimTim Vanilla Staff
    Can you clear your browser's cache and try again?

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

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