Speed Matters: Taking Control!

There sometimes seems to be no better compliment than, "Man, he's got a fast site!" No mention of content.

How many times have I heard someone tell me, "Good site, but it's too slow." Hmmm, many times.

Where does one draw the line, anyway, between a good looking site, one with good content and nice graphics, and pages which happen to be, for some folks, "a bit big?"

How big is too big? How slow, too slow? How can I speed things up? And does it really matter?

First the last. Yes, in fact it does matter. Speed matters. Size influences speed, so size matters, too.

How long are surfers willing to wait for a page to download? Well, it depends on the surfer, doesn't it? But is there an heuristic - a rule of thumb - that we can build our pages around? Sure, I'll give you one. 15 to 20 seconds. How's that sound? Why?

The 15 to 20 seconds rule goes back a long way. Back in the days when a 14.4 modem was most common and the 28.8 modems were just coming out, it was often stated that home page sizes should be kept to 10 to 15K, and not more than about 20K (including both the HTML for the page as well as any images on the page). To make a rough calculation on how fast a page will load for a given modem speed, divide the modem speed by 10 and the result is the approximate number of characters per second that the modem will handle.

So, for a 14.4 modem, this gives a result of 1,440 characters per second. Thus, a 14.4 modem will load a 15K page (15,360 bytes) in just a fraction over 10 seconds (15,360/1,440 = 10.66); and a 20K page will load in just under 15 seconds. And that is where the 15 to 20 seconds came from. Since almost everyone now runs at 28.8 or higher, page sizes of 20 to 40K are not unreasonable at all. In fact, this is a good size range and another rule of thumb for you.

Accordingly, a 50K page will load in 17.36 seconds (under optimal conditions) with a 28.8K modem; but since more and more people have upgraded to a 57.6K modem, a 50K page would take only half this time, or 8.68 seconds - not bad! So can we increase our page sizes then? Up to you, but for now I'm going to stay with and recommend a new heuristic (as far as I know): the 15-50 rule of thumb: 15 seconds and 50K.

Remember we have to bear in mind the poor people with slow modems and slow Internet connections around the world who are sitting around waiting for your page to download. The bottom line is, "Do you want to risk losing them because they got tired of waiting and surfed on?" I don't.

I'd also think twice before putting up a big, fancy slow-loading Flash page. You can only get so many seconds, and so many clicks (3?), out of your average surfer. Attention spans are not on the rise, ladies and gentlemen!

This really depends on the connection your web host has with the Internet. Many web hosting companies buy their connections from large backbone providers like UUNET. At the least, they should have T3 lines (on which more soon).

Many companies have more than one connection to the Internet, which is called "multi-homing." This allows people to still be able to access your site even if one connection fails. Good web hosts should also have backup power supplies (like diesel generators, etc.); do regular backups of their web servers; and, very importantly, have real people on site who know how to fix things quickly when they go wrong which they inevitably will!

Speed from the host also depends on how many web sites they put on each of their servers. If you happen to be on a server with only 100 web sites on it, versus one with 200 web sites running, your site is going to run more quickly with the first server. This is a good question to ask your potential web hosts; i.e., "how many sites (and what kind of sites!) are you running on your servers?" You can guess quite easily what kind of sites are going to be high-traffic, and which ones would not be receiving so many hits.

OK, getting down to brass tacks, what's all this T-1/OC-3 business mean, anyway? It's not that complicated, really. Web hosting companies (as a rule) connect to the Internet through "T" (Transmission), "OC" (Optical Carrier), and/or "DS" (Digital Signal) lines. Many smaller web hosts still use T1's to connect your site to the world at a rate of 1.544 megabits per second (Mbps - on which more later). The big, fast guys use redundant, multiple OC3 (155.52 Mbps) lines to offer their clients the bandwidth they need for multiple user sessions on their site(s) at any given time.

The best web hosts today use these "redundant" lines to ensure that customers' sites remain up and active, even if their primary Internet connections are temporarily unavailable. It's a good idea to check which hosts offer backup connections fast enough to maintain your site's performance in case of a primary line failure.

When you search for a company on HostSearch to meet your criteria, your search results will contain a link to much of this information about different web hosts, so you can compare and make an informed decision.

In addition to offering the fastest network connections possible, a web host should provision its lines and circuits to use less than fifty percent of available bandwidth. Overburdened network connections will often result in poor site performance; in fact, a lightly-used T1 line will transfer data faster than an overused T3 connection (see table below). Again, be sure to ask potential web hosts about their network capacity and utilization to be sure that your site will benefit from the fast network connections they may have advertised.

Most hosting companies are connected to the Internet by T1 & T3 lines. A T1 line can carry roughly 1.5 Mbps while a T3 can carry approximately 43 Mbps. A T3 connection provides a much larger amount of bandwidth and speed availability. However, as mentioned above, you should also check to see how many clients are hosted on any single machine. If a server is overloaded, its performance will be hindered - despite the highest high-speed Internet connection.

A T-3 is a dedicated telephone connection supporting data rates of about 43 Mbps. A T-3 line actually consists of 672 individual channels, each of which supports 64 Kbps (672 x 64 = 43008). T-3 lines are used mainly by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connecting to the Internet backbone - and for the backbone itself. T-3 lines are sometimes referred to as DS3 lines.

A T-1 is a dedicated telephone connection supporting data rates of 1.544 Mbps. A T-1 line actually consists of 24 individual channels, each of which supports 64 Kbps. Each 64 Kbit/second channel can be configured to carry either voice or data traffic. Most telephone companies allow you to buy just some of these individual channels, known as fractional T-1 access. T-1 lines are a popular leased line option for businesses connecting to the Internet and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connecting to the Internet backbone. The Internet backbone itself consists of faster T-3 connections. (T-1 lines are sometimes referred to as DS1 lines.)

A fractional T-1 line has one or more channels of a T-1 service. A complete T-1 carrier contains 24 channels, each of which provides 64 Kbps. Most phone companies, however, also sell fractional T-1 lines, which provide less bandwidth but are also less expensive. Typically, fractional T-1 lines are sold in increments of 56 Kbps (the extra 8 Kbps per channel is used for data management).

Some things you can control, others you cannot. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about general Internet slowdowns. Do make sure you have a good web host with high-speed connections and knock on wood for good luck.

However, you can take some fairly quick and easy steps so that your site downloads as quickly as possible.

We don't have room to go into all the details here, but we can give you a couple pointers. We leave you, for now, with these tips on how to make your pages smaller, and thus, FASTER:

• Careful with those graphics. Sure, everyone likes nice images, but if you can have your image look just about as nice at 10K as it does at 80K, do it! Many new graphics programs are designed with the Web in mind, such as Adobe Photoshop 5.5 and up, Ulead PhotoImpact, Corel Draw 8, and others. You can save images that look nice at a reasonable size with these programs.

• Careful with your code. Some popular WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design programs (like NetObjects Fusion and Dreamweaver) generate lots of extra funky code (and add images like transparent GIFs) and do unexpected things to your tables, like unnecessary nesting, which dramatically increases the size of your web pages.

If possible, edit your code, or at least break up those big tables into a number of smaller ones, which will at least appear to load faster. If you can't edit the code yourself, consider using Dreamweaver or another program to do it - they have some useful features such as "Clean Up HTML" and "Clean Up WORD HTML" - always a good idea! - which you might want to explore.