To deflate or not to deflate on company intranet site?
We want to speed up the page rendering time of our internal web-based CRM tool for our employees. Network wise, we have plenty of bandwidth with most switches being gigabit rated.
We thought about deflating/compressing JavaScript, CSS, etc to get the content to download faster (due to smaller size) but we're thinking it would be a bad idea because of the below issues but let me know if you disagree.
1. Any download speed improvement (which would be small since we're on a internal LAN) would not be offset by the slow down in rendering due to the fact that browser has to wait for the whole page has to be downloaded (and uncompressed) before it can start rendering the content.
2. The decompression will take some amount of extra CPU time. It would probably be small, but it would be more. This is a concern because many employees are on older workstations (Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM).
Do you disagree?
Thanks,
http://www.t1shopper.com/
We thought about deflating/compressing JavaScript, CSS, etc to get the content to download faster (due to smaller size) but we're thinking it would be a bad idea because of the below issues but let me know if you disagree.
1. Any download speed improvement (which would be small since we're on a internal LAN) would not be offset by the slow down in rendering due to the fact that browser has to wait for the whole page has to be downloaded (and uncompressed) before it can start rendering the content.
2. The decompression will take some amount of extra CPU time. It would probably be small, but it would be more. This is a concern because many employees are on older workstations (Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM).
Do you disagree?
Thanks,
http://www.t1shopper.com/
Carlos Llanos
I would say your problem lies within the fact that they only have 512MB of RAM to play with. Have you tried upgrading 1 station and seeing if the site pages load faster?
ASKER
LOL, yes, of course they would load faster! Oh, and of the several hundred workstations, many of them are running IE6. There's all kinds of problems but these things are not the question at hand.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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