Hi all, just wanted to let everyone know I made two changes this evening to help speed up the website. These changes should not change the way you see things on the site, but, they might make the browsing experience a little faster.

1) Changed from GD2 image compression to ImageMagick 6.

2) Enabled GZIP compression level 1.

Both of these changes are suggested by Google to increase performance. Because this is a suggestion, not a requirement, I decided to go ahead and make the change. If you see ANYTHING wrong with graphics, load times, or any kind of errors on the site, please post them here. Thank you!

Mike

All too often, I find page loading times painfully slow (10 - 30 s.) -- so much so that I just have to leave the site and let it churn. Same thing this morning during my morning-coffee read. Frustrating, because the site is really good in so many other ways. During today's experience, I noticed there were 194 users visiting the site. All this makes me think that the culprit here may be an under-performing server. Time for an upgrade?

Namerow

Burlington, Ontario

For me it is waiting for the page to load. I believe it is the advertisements that have to load before I can scroll. If I try to scroll to early-explorer wants to recover the page. It's annoying and only on this site.

Yea, I noticed that today too. Maybe making this change wasn't such a good idea. The server probably needs more power to compress data on the fly like this. I'll switch it back.

Update: I disabled the GZIP website compression this morning, but, I left the ImageMagick change. Let me know if you are still seeing slow performance.