[ashel]

Hi there, this is my first post on the forums.

I spent the holidays building a game from an idea I had a couple months ago. It's a game where you place links on web pages, and then others try to find them. Links can be hidden or out in the open. Users can make it hard to find them, or easy so people stumble on them.

There is a whole point system and you can buy/sell/steal links from other players of the game. Join groups, team up, etc...

Ultimately, try to get ranked.

Hopefully it will get some attention and people will like it.

Check it out at www.TrickyLinks.com

It's a pretty original game, I think. Give me some feedback and let me know if it's interesting or just plain stupid.

I am at a stopping point on developing it to see if there is any one willing to play. If people start to play, I'll keep working on it and expanding more ideas I have for it.

You won't hurt my feelings.

[mr-shock]

the site took about 12 seconds so load......borderline slow.

[ashel]

mrshock, on Jan 3 2009, 18:32, said:

the site took about 12 seconds so load......borderline slow.

Never takes me more than about 3 seconds. Can I ask which browser you are using?

I looked into several methods of speeding up the site and have implemented several of them.

Thanks and I will look into it some more, test from other PC's etc.

[traxor]

It took me around five seconds to load, most sites have times when they're quite slow, so don't worry about it, even Google doesn't load sometimes and they seem like the placeholder of the internet.

It's a pretty good idea actually, it's kind of like the MySpace game, where you have to get back to yourself from a random person in ten clicks, or find Kevin Bacon in ten clicks, a lot of people enjoy finding stuff and will definitely get into it.

[ashel]

I was looking through the Joomla forums for ways to speed up the load times and found many great ideas.

Also, using this clear cache button FF plugin to clean out my cache slowed my load times down considerably. It removes all the graphics, css, and JS from memory.

Another issue is that if no has hit the server for a while, the server goes sleepy too. It actually runs better when visitors keep it under load. From what I have read, it's simlar to the cache on my local PC. It will hold info in cache and serve it up that way, instead of having to render everything fresh after sitting for a while.

I did utilize query caching on some of my pages, where it made since. So when (if) the server is under a heavy load it doesn't have to keep running the same queries. It just what it has in memory.

Gzip compression and progressive loading are things I am working on today.

The WSO website gave me a ton of information about what I could try to do and where my issues could be.

Myspace was kind of where I got the idea. My play Own Your Friends (OYF) and I thought about what I could do that was original.

Ironically, I'm also working on a way to put links on myspace, since they redirect any link you post to the msplinks website and warn you about phishing.

Thanks for testing.

[traxor]

The main issue with the add-on thing is that most people won't be using Firefox, and even more people won't be willing to install an addon to play a game, regardless of how fun it is, people want to do stuff with minimal effort.

[ashel]

traxor, on Jan 4 2009, 08:34, said:

The main issue with the add-on thing is that most people won't be using Firefox, and even more people won't be willing to install an addon to play a game, regardless of how fun it is, people want to do stuff with minimal effort.

Not sure you understod me. I said the button "slowed" down my load time. It took me longer to load the page after clearing my cache.

I don't expect anyone to install addons to play. That is simply a dev tool for me. I am constantly re-loading the page, so I always have cached files. If I click that button, it's like I've never been to the site before. Hence, a slower load time. It's a really great tool.

[ashel]

For an update.

After installing the cache cleaner button. I too was getting greater than 10 second load times, not even I would use a site that took over 10 seconds to load!

So, I enabled zlib compression on my server. To this, I opened my php.ini file on the server, search for zlib. Found the zlib settings and edited it from "Off" to "On". Then I restart apache. This improved the page load by about 2 seconds, that was according to the WSO site I mentioned earlier in the post.

Next, was this CSS compression technique. This was a little harder. It basically balls up all your CSS files into one file. Less round trips to the server, less pages to process on the local machine, faster load. This shaved close to another 2 seconds off the load time.

Next will be a similar trick. Javascript Compression I already have the code in place, just getting some squirly behavior on my local machine. Think has to do with multi threading.

The only other thing I can do is use "sprites" which I don't have time for. The other recommendations the WSO is pointing out are not possible. The site relies on Mootools which is a large file, even when compressed, so my JS size keeps taking a hit.

After restarting the Apache server to clear its cache, and clearing my browser cache, I get consistent load times under 7 seconds.

Anyone get anything grossly different?

I can live with that for now. I've also identified several files that the CSS file is looking for that don't exist. I need to weed out these requests in the CSS file. Between these files and compressing the JS down a bit more, I'm hoping to reduce another 2 seconds on the load time.

Keep in mind, right now it's under 7 seconds in a worst case scenario. For a revisit, the page loads in under 3 seconds for me.