#1
About the slow site (Hopefully a constructive post)
Ok firstly I'll apologise for making a new thread to discuss this, a better place would have been on the end of the latest "Site running slow" whine, but I felt that thread was a bit dead and I'd like this to get read as I hope it'll be useful.From what I can see a large factor in the site running slow is inefficient HTML output. Each index page for the maps is over 700kb not including images, probably closer to 800kb with images. This is almost entirely due to the Author drop down box. If the stats in the top right are true you are getting at least 5000 hits a day, I would be surprised if that was producing less than about 6gig of traffic a day with pages that big. If you got rid of the author drop down box i believe you could reduce that by at least 80%! This is not only increasing your costs as bandwidth is not free, but also making the site feel slow even to users on DSL (I have 2mbit DSL). I dread to think how it feels to users on modems or those who share connections with many others!
Now I'm not just here to tell you whats wrong but also to offer help, I am a pretty good PHP coder and have plenty of knowledge of webdev and I'd be happy to lend a hand tightening stuff up. Personnally I'd suggest ditching the author drop down box, its huge and causing a massive amount of the bandwidth use, but if you don't want to how about moving it to a separate search page. At least then its not loaded by everyone who visits just to see the latest few maps. If you want things to stay exactly as they are then I strongly advise you talk to your hosting provider about output compression. This on-the-fly compression could save you a lot of bandwidth and pretty much all web browsers support it. I would guess you'd get at a 50% compression ratio on the maps indexs, if not higher.
Well if this is old news then please ignore me, but I hope it is of interest to you, and I hope I can help you get your site running faster, with lower costs.
-Murphybob
