Okay, I have a question: what does it mean if you have a lot of orange bars in the waterfall?
Does it mean that ‘Connection: keep-alive’ probably is not working?
Not necessarily. IE 8 will open 6 connections per domain and since it looks like they’re all happening at the same time my guess is that that is what is happening (in addition to being from a couple of different domains since you have more than 6).
If you see it continue to open new connections to the same hosts later in the waterfall then I’d say there was a problem. You can also click on the “keep-alive” grade and it will show you a list of requests where the keep-alives were not working correctly.
This is the whole chart… We use 1 seperate domain for image files (jpg, gif, png) except those coming from the css/js files…
We do have a minor issue with some files closing the connection. But I guess there is nothing more we can do about those orange bars then :-). Thanks for the quick reply :-).
Yeah, the combination of 2 domains + IE8 is probably why you’re seeing it all load in parallel. The only thing you can really do to improve is to look into using a CDN if you’re not already which will shorten the connection and request times.
Mmm, most visitors come from the country where the servers are already, so probably no gain there. One thing left to do is GZIP, to reduce the blue bars…