I am trying to improve the performance of our most popular site for our primary clients - a list of electronic journals (ejournals). Currently, from on-campus (therefore, using campus internet connections, which are very fast), the load time for the largest listings (for titles beginning with A or J) averages 9 seconds. This is not very good. But it gets much worse from off-campus (upwards of a minute). The code is moderately complex (several conditionals determine exactly what about each title is displayed) and heavily commented. There are also tiny images that are displayed for each title. But I think the problem may simply be the sheer number of records in the results set: for the A's there are 323 titles, and the J's there are 604. Multiply the execution of the code by the number of titles, and it is no surprise it takes a while to load. I'm trying to create potential solutions, but most of these ideas seem like they may be too confusing to our clients. After some usability tests, we have found that our clients (academic medical faculty, students and staff) do not mind scrolling through a long list as much as they mind having difficulties finding links that are "hidden" on separate pages. And the alphabet browsing is still the most common way our clients find titles, despite the long load time. However, we would like to reduce the load time as much as possible. What behind-the-scenes, technical tricks can I do to improve this? Another thing - using "debug" mode, I get the "Execution time" in milleseconds. However, when I use a hand-held timer, the average load time is 3x the "Execution" time. What does "execution" time measure? Does the difference mean that the problem is elsewhere? Thanks for any help you can give me. Karen R. Harker, MLS UT Southwestern Medical Library 5323 Harry Hines Blvd. Dallas, TX 75390-9049 214-648-1698 http://www.swmed.edu/library/
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2919.6307" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY style="FONT: 8pt MS Sans Serif; MARGIN-LEFT: 2px; MARGIN-TOP: 2px"> <DIV><FONT size=1>I am trying to improve the performance of our most popular site for our primary clients - a list of electronic journals (ejournals). Currently, from on-campus (therefore, using campus internet connections, which are very fast), the load time for the largest listings (for titles beginning with A or J) averages 9 seconds. This is not very good. </FONT><FONT size=1>But it gets much worse from off-campus (upwards of a minute).</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=1>The code is moderately complex (several conditionals determine exactly what about each title is displayed) and heavily commented. There are also tiny images that are displayed for each title. But I think the problem may simply be the sheer number of records in the results set: for the A's there are 323 titles, and the J's there are 604. Multiply the execution of the code by the number of titles, and it is no surprise it takes a while to load.</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=1>I'm trying to create potential solutions, but most of these ideas seem like they may be too confusing to our clients. After some usability tests, we have found that our clients (academic medical faculty, students and staff) do not mind scrolling through a long list as much as they mind having difficulties finding links that are "hidden" on separate pages. And the alphabet browsing is still the most common way our clients find titles, despite the long load time.</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=1>However, we would like to reduce the load time as much as possible. What behind-the-scenes, technical tricks can I do to improve this? </FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=1>Another thing - using "debug" mode, I get the "Execution time" in milleseconds. However, when I use a hand-held timer, the average load time is 3x the "Execution" time. What does "execution" time measure? Does the difference mean that the problem is elsewhere?</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=1>Thanks for any help you can give me.</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Karen R. Harker, MLS<BR>UT Southwestern Medical Library<BR>5323 Harry Hines Blvd.<BR>Dallas, TX 75390-9049<BR>214-648-1698<BR><A href="http://www.swmed.edu/library/">http://www.swmed.edu/library/</A></DIV></BODY></HTML>
