Speed Improvements

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:59:59 -800

Today I installed Google
Page Speed to see if I could make my site load faster. Sure enough, it
had a few suggestions that I've implemented. The first is that the image
tiles in the panorama viewer are now served from separate hosts, which
eliminates the initial lag when a panorama has just begun to load. It also
provides a few more lanes (12 on Firefox) of download to the browser, which
shortens download queue depths and (hopefully) makes better use of internet
bandwidth. The second improvement is that thumbnails in the photo albums are
now saved at 90% quality instead of 100%, which shrank the files by about a
third. The third improvement also applies to the thumbnails--I now run
jpegoptim(1) on them, which removes EXIF data and optimizes the Huffman
tables. This further shrinks the thumbnails to a third of the size that they
were before. The fourth improvement was to reduce the quality of the panorama
preview images to 75%, which cut the download size in half. Hope you enjoy
the performance enhancements!