host locally or in the USA?

[leonid]

(10-26-2010 12:56 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  For being new to it the site is actually looking really good. There are a couple of background images that could be combined into sprites but that's pretty much it for the basics.

It looks like you are serving some images from cloudfront and some still aren't - probably a good idea to get all of the images on a CDN (though looking at the performance, if AU is your primary customer base, it may make sense to use something other than cloudfront since they don't have anything on the continent itself).

It's about a year old, but there is a good thread on AU CDN presence and pricing here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1132514

It is probably worth looking at your actual app server and back-end logic. It looks like there's about 0.5 seconds of processing time to generate the page and anything you do there will go directly to the experience.

Beyond that you'll probably be getting into some pretty advanced territory to try and deliver the images in fewer requests. You could sprite them (not traditional css sprites: http://www.artzstudio.com/2010/04/img-sp...-contrast/) but you'd probably need to have some code that generates them dynamically since it's a products listing. You could also go the route of Data URI's or MHTML to embed the images directly. It might not hurt to try one of the accelerator products that will do it for you on the fly - Strangeloop, Aptimize and Acceloweb all have solutions that will do some of the browser-specific optimizations without having to write a bunch of custom code.

Hi Norman,
I'm Leonid - the CTO of AcceloWeb, which was mentioned by Pat.
If you'd like to apply many powerful optimization techniques to your website automatically, without any changes in its code (which will allow you to keep maintaining it easily), AcceloWeb can help you. Feel free to contact us on sales [at] acceloweb.com for further details and for a demonstration how your website can be accelerated.


Leonid Fainberg
Co-founder & CTO
AcceloWeb