todd peach seattle, washi Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Visually, I kind of like the 'graybar' layout in the unified forum that I'm seeing for the first time this morning. It restores some of the 'readability' that I feel we've lost when you took away my beloved underlined links. Unfortunately it's implemented as a table (probably the only way to do it). This means the entire 400Kb of table def has to come down the pipe before I can even see the top topic. This is pretty dang slow, even on my moderately speedy corporate internet. Being a dynamic dataset, I have to endure this slow reload every time I go 'back' from a post to the unified forum. I appreciate the effort. I know you're not going to please everybody. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I'm not sure the table is the culprit here. The unified view is sometimes just slow. We have a admin display which shows theads in AOLServer which have been "stuck" for over 30 seconds, and the script that generates the unified view is frequently one of the sore thumbs sticking out. It isn't clear why, but that could be what you are seeing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd peach seattle, washi Posted February 21, 2003 Author Share Posted February 21, 2003 Is the offending script an 'all or nothing' type (i.e., like a table, where you can't view anything till it's done)? I'm seeing 'status' of the page loading on my side. It looks like it's coming across 'steadily' at anywhere from 20 - 80 KB / second (depending on network traffic). It's just that this translates to 5 - 20 seconds of wait time without seeing anything, everytime I return to unified. It seemed like the previous incarnations of the unified page would paint the first 'above the fold' topics pretty quickly and I only had to wait the 20 seconds (an internet lifetime! When did we become so impatient?) if I wanted to peruse the topics that were way down near the bottom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Todd, if you don't mind, let's try an experiment. In a few minutes, I will pre-generate a Unified View and make it available on the URL http://www.photo.net/bboard/unified2.html This will involve no database interactions at all, since it will just be static html. Could you let me know how long it takes before you see the first screenful of data? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solja Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I'd agree with Brian, I'm not sure it's the table that's causing your problems. I might be wrong, but on my side of things, I've <i>never</i> had the Unified view load incremementally. I've always gotten the top items of the normal Photo.net page, i.e. the logo, search bar, and gray menu bar, then I had to wait for all of the unified topics to load then I got them all at once. This came out to a 10 - 15 second wait both on my cable connection from home and on my T1 connection at work, running Win2K Pro and IE6 at both locations. So, I'm not sure the table is causing your problems. <p> I'm a web designer and I use tables quite often and I rarely see any problems with them taking longer to load than a normal list. <p> Anyway, Brian thanks a LOT for the alternating gray bars. Makes readability much better, I use this approach quite often when displaying long lists of items, either on the web or in spreadsheets. Great idea, thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimh Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I agree with Todd, it's the table. Browsers don't render table contents until everything is downloaded. Content not enclosed in table tags is rendered in the order it's downloaded. Philip writes about it <a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/static">here</a> and it seems to be one of those tings that hasn't changed despite generations of browsers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicholas Barry Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I don't know which browsers others are using but Chimera (a Mozilla-based drivative soon to be called Camino) loads tables incrementally. I can see contents before the table's finished. I don't think this is a tables issue. But it might be an IE issue. In which case it may as well be a tables issue. That having been said, I really like the new tables layout. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Jim, I'm not disagreeing with the notion that the table is not displayed until down-loaded in its entirety. I'm questioning whether any perceived significant wait is accounted for primarily by that. The way the unified view is generated is that a complex SQL query is done and then the items are emitted one by one. I believe that it is the query that takes time. Yes, it is true that once the query returns and the items start being emitted, you will see them immediately if they are are list items, for example, rather than table rows, but this difference is not a significant element of the total wait. At least, that seems the most probable to me. If you would care to download http://www.photo.net/bboard/unified2 which is typically huge Unified View table listing, I think you will see that it is returned quite fast, so that any optimization of the first page worth, achieved by not making it a table, isn't really worth doing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimh Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 You're right. The static page loads really fast compared to the real one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd peach seattle, washi Posted February 21, 2003 Author Share Posted February 21, 2003 <i> If you would care to download http://www.photo.net/bboard/unified2 . . .</i> <p> (I just returned from lunch.) I can't get that one to load due to a missing stylesheet (http://www.photo.net/bboard/style-000000.css not found). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve_dunn2 Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 <p>Older Netscape browsers (at least up to 4.7x on Windows) didn't handle large tables gracefully - they'd sit there, consuming CPU cycles and large amounts of RAM for ages before displaying large tables. Netscape 7.01 on Windows seems to be better, and it apparently displays tables incrementally - during the 10-15 seconds it took to download the unified forum just now on my machine, I could see the top of the table. </p> <p>BTW, at least at busy times, the unified forum always downloads in fits and starts for me. If I used a browser that couldn't display tables until the whole thing had downloaded, I'd consider the new table a step backwards. Since my browser can handle it, though, I like it - it's much more readable than the previous new look that came along earlier this week.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd peach seattle, washi Posted February 21, 2003 Author Share Posted February 21, 2003 Steve's likely got the answer (for me). I'm using Netscape 4.73 here at work as it's our current 'approved standard' (I think a change is a - comin'). Throughput in the last hour or so has been more like 6KB / Second, leaving me staring at a 'white screen' for 65 seconds on the unified forum, watching my status bar 'count up' the bytes slowly until the table end, when finally the screen paints all at once. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I'm on a 56K dialup but the unified forum loading isn't much slower then Todd seems to get on a T1. What seem to be happening is that the headers etc. are downloaded and displayed. Then there's maybe a 20 second pause with no data exchange, then a datastream is downloaded (another 10-15 seconds or so), then the table appears. I presume the wait in the middle is the SQL query operating? I'n using IE v6.0.2800.1106 with SP1 under W2K. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 No, as Todd said, his problem is Netscape 4.7. I just downloaded it from Netscape's site, and the new table-based Unified View is horrendously slow in this browser. Netscape 4.7 is just broken when dealing with large tables. Unfortunately, probably quite a few people have this browser, despite it being probably 4-5 years old by now. So I've recoded the Unified View to break it up into a series of 10-row tables, with no padding. This makes the Unified View very fast for me in Netscape 4.7, assuming the query goes fast (which is not always the case). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd peach seattle, washi Posted February 22, 2003 Author Share Posted February 22, 2003 Kewl! Thanks Brian. I'm now looking at it at home (same browser, slow wounded 28K modem) and the performance is a lot better with your '10 at a time' fix. My impression is 'no lag' (must be hitting a good SQL window) for the page to begin painting and fill up the 'above the fold' stuff. If I watch my scroll bar carefully, I can see the 10 record 'chunks' hit and change the scroll bar, almost like a non-table page. Good compromise. Thanks again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimh Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 I use IE 6 but it cured the slowness here too. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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