Wasn't it Patrick who wrote: >2). The map overall seems to load very slow. Sometimes it can be about >40-50 seconds loading the map page. I seem to notice it is faster with >firefox but still, i would like it to load immediate or as close as. I >noticed on other sites with google maps, that this is happening also to >others. The image used in overlay is <- 200kb so it seems to be >delayed from google servers maybe? I see the egg timer appear >sometimes also while waiting and screen freezes while waiting on map to >load until it eventually loads. > >3). When map loads, I always get the original google maps version of >the hospital and a few seconds later, my overlay map will kick in and >replace the google version. Is there a way, that when I load the map >page, that googles horrible orangey / pink colour version of the >hospital map, will not load for people to see.
One problem is that your overlay.jpg image is quite large. A 169kb file is going to take a while to download (in my tests it took 1.565 seconds to download over a 1.5 Megabit/sec ADSL connection). JPG format achieves good compression for things like photos, but is pretty poor at compressing illustrations like this. GIF format would be good for compressing large areas of plain colour. If you've got an original copy of the image in a lossless format, try outputting it as a GIF file and see how small that is. [If you take your existing JPG image and export that as a GIF file, then unfortunately the file size increases, because the GIF file preserves the tiny variations in colour that were created by saving the image in JPG format.] Some browsers also take a performance hit when an image file fails to load. In this case your body_bg.png file throws a 404 error: http://www.tymonrovers.com/images/body_bg.png I wasn't able to reproduce the 30-40 seconds loading time (I didn't try using a dialup connection). If you have the capability to create an alias for your subdomain, then you can get an improvement in MSIE by moving overlay.jpg there. What happens is that MSIE will only open two connections to any one (sub)domain, and this page happens to end up with a bottleneck on those connections, and you sometimes get a gridlock situation between the two large files overlay.jpg and locations.xml. Due to security restrictions, you can't move locations.xml but if you can create an alias, you could move overlay.jpg to, say, http://data.tymonrovers.com/attachments/Patrick/IMap/overlay.jpg and MSIE would open a separate connection to that subdomain. -- http://econym.org.uk/gmap The Blackpool Community Church Javascript Team --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
