How To Speed Up Miva Website?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

Also do go after server side and miva merchant side speed improvements. See if you can reduce the number of modules you have in use on any one page. Especially if you are using toolkit or toolbelt. You might be able to get away with just one of them. Or maybe one of them can handle something you have a single module for.

The "Number" of modules is of relative unimportance verses the amount of time each module takes to perform its tasks. A module specific feature, that can be duplicated using toolkit/toolbelt is often faster, even when used in conjunction with the toolkit/toolbelt. Basically, what I am saying is that you can't make blanket statements about modules. Even 'single-task' modules are not all equal, even when they do the same task.

I believe toolkit/toolbelt (and our Merchant FAST module) all have timing functions built in. If you are serious about speed, you need to evaluate each task/module on its on merits.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

KayakBabe:

You brought up a good point:

2. if you can, make sure you have your image dimensions defined. If you've got your images at standardized sizes. This is easy. You may have already done it. What this does is reduce the amount of time it takes the browser to calculate the page dimensions so it can render it faster within the browser.

Miva Merchant doesn't allow one to define image size in the Product Admin area, although the OUI interface DID allow you to do that in Merchant 4. The implementation was nice and easy, because there was a javascript that would actually go and look up the dimensions automatically and insert them into the appropriate fields once you defined the image path in the product admin tab.

As you mentioned, it can be done by standardizing image sizes, and then modifying the page templates for the CTGY, PROD, PLST, SRCH, etc., screens so that they have the standardized width and height defined.

But it would be much better if Merchant 5 had been developed to do the automatic look up of image dimensions from the product admin tab.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

KayakBabe:
But it would be much better if Merchant 5 had been developed to do the automatic look up of image dimensions from the product admin tab.

The look up time would probably negate the (percieved) speed increase. Besides, it would be encouraging BAD design practices. Like images SHOULD be consistant in size. (i.e., thumbnails, product images, etc)

[kayakbabe]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

I agree with Bruce, standardized image dimensions for like screens are much better for design and even more importantly for usability of a website.

However, I disagree with him over the speed increase. I know for a fact that I got improvement on my page loading speeds by defining image sizes. I'm not talking about just the product image sizes.. but about ALL the image sizes (in the header, footer, button images, I mean everywhere).

I do agree with Bruce about bad practices. Allowing entry of sizes for image, will lead to novice or very lazy employees (or maybe even a few site owners) doing some incredibly silly things.. like using an admin field for size dimensions to actually force html to write out different sizes in order to resize the images on their customer facing pages. THat is a very bad practice. Those image not only look bad, but if they are huge and resized small they take an unnecessarily long time to load (or if streched larger, they look pixelated and ugly, or if squished too much also look pixilated and ugly). Those same site owners complain when their pages take a long time to load, the want to blame their site developers who they paid to build their gui, or blame their host.
I don't know how many times, I have had people ask me why their thumbnails look aweful. They put in the same image file as their big image.. and just set the height and width to be 100 pixels or something. BAD BAD looks BAD loads BAD it's just BAD.

Gee, I guess that struck a nerve with me.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

However, I disagree with him over the speed increase. I know for a fact that I got improvement on my page loading speeds by defining image sizes. I'm not talking about just the product image sizes.. but about ALL the image sizes (in the header, footer, button images, I mean everywhere).

I think I may not have been clear...I wasn't saying that dimensioning images wasn't helpful, just that having to fetch, then write out each image dimension is going to ADD to processing time...and the dimensioning, while it causes the page to write faster, doesn't decrease processing or download time...so the net effect may be diminished.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

I think I may not have been clear...I wasn't saying that dimensioning images wasn't helpful, just that having to fetch, then write out each image dimension is going to ADD to processing time...and the dimensioning, while it causes the page to write faster, doesn't decrease processing or download time...so the net effect may be diminished.

That OpenUI feature only does the calculation at the time the image is loaded and stores it in the db.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

Hi there, Bruce:

The look up time would probably negate the (percieved) speed increase.

Actually, the way that OUI works, the look up is done ONCE when the product is created in the ADMIN interface, not in the storefront.

so in essence, there are two custom fields in the Admin for each image (width and height) and, if you fail to enter the dimensions in by hand, the admin will fill them in automatically (provided they have already been uploaded to the server path that you specify in the image url fields).

[kayakbabe]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

Speed of adding 2 integar fields to an existing database query and returning that info AND the output of maybe 25 or so extra characters in the output is going to miniscule compared to the page rendering time savings done in the browser.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

And BTW:

The lookup is only done when you add products one at a time through the admin interface.

If you were to upload products via a flat file and neglected to add the image dimensions to the flat file, then it WOULDN'T look up and populate the db fields for image dimensions when you upload the flat file. I think that your images would then just end up with width="" and height="" tags.

Gosh, all this talking about Merchant 4 is making me feel nostalgic... It's kind of like talking about 80's bands or something. Time to break out my Cocteau Twins and Echo and the Bunnymen albums...