Why is Alpha so slow?

[cellboy]

This is all fascinating stuff. Cal I looked at your page and was amazed - it is very fast! Unfortunately, I'm a typical A5 user and not very adept with xbasic or HTML, so it is definitely not the way to go. Unfortunately I, like most users, am going to have to rely mainly on standard components with a little tweaking here. I have tried most of the thing suggested but the speed is still below what I my colleagues consider acceptable in the workplace. So what is AJAX and will it's arrival improve matters for the likes of me?

[JerryBrightbill]

AJAX is a combination of techniques used to increase the speed of a browser based application. As mentioned, one of the major speed impacts comes from transmitting the whole page HTML back and forth from the server. Using AJAX, the initial page must still be built and send to the client - once. When you want to update that page, AJAX allows sending a data request to the server and the server will return just data, not a full page of HTML. The local browser uses JavaScript to update the local page with the new data.

This will have a major speed improvement on some page designs, such as grids. AJAX on a grid can behave very much like a desktop browse and can almost be as fast in some cases. On the other hand, if you have many unique pages, AJAX concepts may not show as much impact as some think, since the initial full HTML page must still be loaded. Probably one of the best examples of the impact of AJAX is Google Maps. It is almost like working on a desktop.

AJAX is a significant change, but does not address all speed issues. Considerable effort to increase speed in other areas continue. Changes in the latest builds of Alpha Five have made components considerable faster. The time to load each component has dropped about .2 to .3 seconds. This may not seem like much until you have a couple components on one page. The average user can definitely see the difference.

One thing to remember is that even with AJAX, a web based application can never quite match the speed and flexibility of a traditional desktop application. In certain conditions, it can get close, but the limitations of network speed and the standardized languages like HTML will continue to impose speed restrictions for the forseeable future.

[peteconway]

Read Only Site

If you would like to compare sites, goto www.mediaessentials.com.au login alpha password developer. It's a read only (mainly) and uses a5online.
I'll leave it up for a while.

Peter

[cellboy]

Pete

Thanks for the chance to look your site seems to work well. I beginning to think our network connection is slow, which might be part of the problem. Also, are tab controls liable to slow layouts down? I have one design where the links to sub pages take a good 6 or 7 seconds to load. It is a form with tabbed controls, could that be part of the problem?

http://nhmedia.alphafiveonline.com/HomeNH48s2Media.a5w

Kind regards

David

[peteconway]

Get control of images.

I'll look into that for you but please get contol of the images. The bmp file is 320k the equiv in jpg is 55k max. see if yo can spot the difference
...
...


top 56k

middle 55k

lower (bmp) 360k

10% compression used.

peter

[cellboy]

Fair point Pete, but I didn't mean that part. I was referring to the three underlined links at the bottom of the page, not the link to the pix (these were done in a real rush and were literally thrown up with what I had).

My

[peteconway]

Works fine from this side of the world.

Peter Text data inserted. No issue detected. - Peter