WebPageTest

SWortham · (This post was last modified: 03-06-2012 08:54 AM by SWortham.)

(03-06-2012 07:21 AM)doc_uk Wrote: @Marvin + SWortham
Point taken - I had images with less content (and thus less kb) initially when I set this animation up. I've just tried it on our test site for IE8 with the animation as 8 separate images rather than base64, the results come in about the same times for the document complete time. However what has stayed from the initial testing I did when setting up the animation is the improved start render time - 1.9 seconds for the base64 images page as opposed to 3.1 seconds for the 8 images, both on IE8.

That is weird that the start render time increased. I wonder if your Javascript is blocking the rendering somehow until the images have downloaded. That normally doesn't happen, but maybe it's possible. I did notice that your anim.js file is referenced inside the <head>. If it's possible to do so without causing errors, you'd be better off putting this file in the <body>. That's because rendering will be blocked until all CSS and JS files in the <head> have been downloaded.

Also I don't know if you've run into this problem. But after StackOverflow was launched Jeff Atwood soon regretted launching with the stackoverflow.com domain. By not including a www, the cookies are shared across the entire domain by default. Therefore introducing a cdn.stackoverflow.com subdomain wouldn't actually be a cookieless domain. But if your entire site is sitting on 'www', then you can introduce a new subdomain 'cdn.[mydomain].com' and it will be cookieless as long as you never explicitly create cookies or serve dynamic content from that subdomain.