I actually think your 'rough' version is quite quick - and I'm using an old 1.86Ghz/2Gb RAM laptop from ~ 2004. As a user I wouldn't be irrirated by its speed and am impressed by its performance.
1.) Use pngcrush or something similar to make your files as small as possible if you don't already. It won't drastically improve load times but every little helps. 2.) The real problem seems to occur when you use the animation feature, it's slow to start with then once the tiles have been transfered its quite snappy. Are you asking if there is a way that you can 'buffer' the tiles that might be requested if the user chooses to 'play' the animation for that dataset? If you try to cache tiles I suspect you will run into problems because some browsers (like firefox) manage resource caching very strictly and won't cache images that aren't actually being displayed in the visible area of the window. Personally I think this might have more to do with managing user- expectations than improving load times (which are already fairly optimal). For example if I went to a similar site and downloaded a movie of this data, I would expect to wait a little while for it to 'buffer'? Perhaps you could make some sort of loading/buffering div which covers the map area during the first-loop giving the impression it is 'buffering' (which it sort of is). Then on the second loop simply set the buffering window to display: none. The key will be in the graphical implementation (e.g. have some sort of rotating 'loading' image like a youtube movie OR use the 16 days as steps in a progressive 'loading bar' - either way users will be able to see their wait is almost over. You could also look into loading the tiles from different URLs to overcome some browsers limitations on the number of open connections to a single domain at any one time. Again it won't make a decisive difference but every little will help. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To post to this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3?hl=en.
