30 sec page load

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hello ,
From the results (regular test and visual test), the URL below takes 30+ seconds to render visually from Virginia.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120119_XQ_2XYTP/

http://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php?id=120119_ba56787f0d520c6218d9d3af572709e898f54c67

Am I understanding this correctly that visually the user will NOT see anything until the 30 seconds has past?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Traolly Xiong

2

Yes. The start render time is 1.7 seconds but it looks like that is just a subtle color change in the background color. It looks like nothing gets visually displayed on this page until everything is loaded (at 30 seconds).

3

Would you agree the developer has done something fundamentally wrong here as to loading/downloading the images prior to rendering the page as you can tell the page does NOT use all the X #s of images?

Other sites like Keynote is showing the the render time for 13 seconds from New York. Are we sure it’s really taking 30 seconds from Virginia, IE8 over DSL?

Traolly Xiong

4

It looks like it took 15 seconds the last time I tried it ( http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120119_BQ_70ec4797eecee824bbb87bd12885fe20/ )so there’s quite a bit of variability. Which Keynote product? Last mile or backbone?

Yes, the developer did a pretty poor job as far as the performance goes.

If you look at the images that got loaded, I don’t even know where the vast majority of them belong on the site because I don’t see them when looking at the page: http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimages.php?test=120119_XQ_2XYTP&run=1&cached=0

It is loading all of the photos for a really large photo gallery before the content the user actually sees (and the photo gallery doesn’t even appear to be a part of the actual page).

5

Thanks. I’ll work the developer on how we can mitigate this slow site performance hit with the unneeded images to render the page.

Couple questions:

  1. How did you get this URL on the site?
    http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimages.php?test=120119_XQ_2XYTP&run=1&cached=0
  2. What you say is the thumb rule to deciding if setting a cookie-less domain is needed on sites? Looking around, many sites have it now an days.
6

The page images is a link right below the waterfall on this page: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120119_XQ_2XYTP/1/details/ (link to “view all images”)

I wouldn’t worry too much about a cookieless domain. That’s kind of a micro-optimization (few milliseconds). If you use a CDN for your images then that would be a good time to make sure that it is on a completely different domain that won’t get polluted by cookies.

7

Thanks for your feedback.