Performance test help

Elan Discussions
1

I’ve been working on the performance of listing all the cars in the ElanRegistry. It works from my desk but I’d really like someone to try that isn’t in the US. Can I get someone in UK, Europe and Australia/New Zealand/Asia to do a quick test for me?

Go to the following 2 URL’s and give me a subjective feel on the performance of each one. If you can time how long it takes to load each page.

test.elanregistry.org/app/list_cars.php
and
test.elanregistry.org/app/test_table.php

Go through a page or two of data (page selector is at the bottom) and do a Search for chassis 5890 (on the test_table page use the search box in the upper right)

Thanks,

Jim

2

Hi Jim,
I am in Australia, and running 50mb/S broadband. The first link took over 2 minutes then just stopped loading even though some of it seemed incomplete but the second one was almost instant load up and search for your car and mine were instant.
Great work.
Regards
Ian

3

Tried it at 7.00am in the U.K. The first link took 1min 20secs to open on my iPad, the second opened in a couple of seconds. Once opened they were quick to search through - the limiting factor was my finger movements.

4

Hi Jim,
I’m in the UK on Fibre BB and supposedly 56mb/s as minimum. W10 Pro using Chrome browser.

Page 1 - Loads in a few seconds (4-5 ?) and readable but on Chrome it’s still loading after all the thumbnail images are showing. I guess that’s loading full size images in the background ? Click on Details (random) and that page comes up very quickly, not instant but only a second or two

What is odd is that going back (Chrome back arrow) to the main page the thumbnails have now turned into larger images, presumably full size ? Checking details on another random car and that also loads instantly and returning this time stays with larger images. I guess that’s how you want it to show up and the thumbnails on the first visit are whilst it’s loading ?

Trying the same page in Opera it’s nothing like as smooth. First time loading is about the same, if anything slightly faster but still with thumbnails. . When it first starts loading it’s almost as if the first image is trying to load full size, decides it’s not a game and then goes to thumbnails bringing the rest up very quickly.
Displaying details is fine, using the back arrow to return is similar to Chrome with full size images but for some reason on my PC it seems to be redrawing itself somehow for several seconds after initial loading.

I realise that’s not much help but I’m not familiar with Opera, I only use it to check my own website displays as intended so it might be something I’m doing with the settings ?

The second trial page is a much better user experience, loads very fast with thumbnails initially, check details and then back to the main page with larger sized images. Clean/slicker on both Chrome & Opera.

Odd things I didn’t understand… (all Chrome Browser)

Load up first trial, flick about and apart from the thumbnails at the start, it works ok. Click the Refresh button and something odd happens. It’s almost as if it’s trying to load a different page, realises and then refreshes the original.

I was watching the images and for a few seconds I got a crashed white Elan come up, the page scrolled and when I went back, it wasn’t there. I repeated it a few times and on my PC at least there’s something adrift here.

Click on page 1, details of a car and it’s fine. Move to Page 2 (upside down pic of green elan :slight_smile: ) and it’s fine. Click on “refresh” and it flicks to a 1974 +2 as the first record before bouncing back to the first page with the white elan.

Now this might just be because you didn’t intend us to move from the first page and hence it’s not set up yet, but if you did expect this to be the final version I think somehow the browser is losing where it should be on the website when it tries to refresh.

As for which is best, I would think the second trial with 10 records displaying will be more user friendly if only because it loads faster. I suspect anyone on a slower BB speed would notice a significant difference between that and the first (25 car) page.

Brian

5

I second the comments of Brian. Strange flickering page. I use Firefox (latest) on Win10.
You use full resolution images as thumbsnails, that hurts speed a lot.
Please take a look at Google PageSpeed Insights (for sure there are some other similar pages), that tells you a lot where you loose time.

6

Thank you all for having a look for me. I used some of the global performance tests but wanted some real world experience.

When I originally built the site I wasn’t too concerned with performance. With a few hundred records it didn’t matter much. With the registry approaching 1500 cars, the change to allow multiple photos, and higher resolution photos performance has bubbled up the list.

Page 1, the current page, loads every record in the browser(1200+) and then sorts by year/series/model. The flicker is the initial load then the filter being applied. All the searching and paging is done client side.

Page 2, my proposed replacement, loads the 10 records at a time. All the search and paging is done server side.

On my list as well as looking at a CDN for static content.

7

That probably explains why I thought the browser was “losing it’s place”. I don’t do website stuff but even so I couldn’t see the “load 1200 & sort it out” model being acceptable across the wide range of devices that folks use.

Plus of course not everyone has a good BB connection, I have friends around here living off the main lines who would claim their ancient 56k modem was faster than what they have now ! (it wouldn’t be, but you get the drift)

Doing everything server side and loading only 10 at a time seems a much more positive way to go and it was a more pleasant experience.

Brian

8

I’ve updated both the List Cars and the Factory Data with the new approach and both are much quicker. This was the biggest performance problem. The image size is next on the list.