Flutterby™! : Old Skool Happiness 2009-05-22 02:13:36.782179+00

Old Skool Happiness

2009-05-22 02:13:36.782179+00 by meuon 3 comments

Sometimes, paying your dues in the old BBS and low bandwidth internet days pays off. I'm checking some interfaces for low bandwidth situations, did a little tuning, allowing the CSS and JS and 2 small images to cache, and now the changing part of these web app interface pages runs from 4kbytes to 12kbytes of data transfered per page. Total pages are < 40kbytes. If I tell the system to drop their logo on low bandwidth connects, I'm really rocking on bursty bad cell phone and 14.4k pots modem uplinks. And sometimes, that is still important.

Stupid pet tricks include:

Putting all the CSS and all the JS in a single file (one each), so they downloads once and stay cached.
Cleaning out redundant CSS (Much Thanks to Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug)
Testing with iptraf and sniffit running on the client. It's kewl looking at a web page as low numbers of "packets".
White space? Who needs CR's or LF's or extra spaces in HTML if it doesn't render.

And darn, it's even working on MSIE in Vista,

How much space is consumed with extra spaces and line ends? I just stripped out extraneous spaces/line ends on my blog and at 14.4k, the savings were 2.2 seconds (page went from 39,033 bytes to 35,633 bytes). At 300 baud, it certainly helps though.

Capt, your blog page first load was 868 packets. and it's full of whitespace and cr\lf's, and some interesting pictures. Hitting these interfaces took: 8 packets - initial page and login (Simple auth), 34 packets: The big customer screen with lots of data..

I'm not sure how it's going to look on modems.. It's hard to fake up such a crappy connection without the gear, which has already been shipped to the customer.

But how big are those 34 packets? Theoretically, my main blog page, minus the graphics, could fit in 24 packets.