Is this slow?

[Livenomadic]

Here is the Page Loading time for my current site:

14.4K 34.54 seconds
28.8K 17.37 seconds
33.6K 14.92 seconds
56K 9.03 seconds
ISDN 128K 2.90 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 0.43 seconds

Is this load time average or other sites? Slow? Fast?

[photon]

I'd say that's on the slow side of the okay range.

[goodroi]

Agreed that is a little slow, but acceptable. As long as it is only a few seconds on 56k than its ok.

Also you may want to think about your target audience. If you are trying to sell streaming video than you probably don't care about 56k since they won't buy this service. If you are selling dial-up internet service than you want it to load very fast for 28k people.

[encyclo]

56K 9.03 seconds

It's a bit too slow - in an ideal world, you should aim for under 5 seconds for 56K. It hurts, I know, but make sure you optimize those graphics and trim that HTML as much as possible.

Of course, the biggist saving you can make is installing gzip compression (mod_gzip on Apache) on your server - that will give you significant speed improvements.

[Livenomadic]

Hi!

My hosting be default has gzip installed. My site uses Mambo and I know one of the settings was "enable gzip". However I am switching to a different CMS what does not have the "enable gzip" setting.

Does the CMS need any special coding for Gzip to speed up deliever or does the gzip speed things up without any special script/coding from the cMS.

Is GZip different than page caching?

[mincklerstraat]

Yes, gzip is different from page caching, although it can be a bit confusing since a good caching system will probably cache the pages in gzip format. Gzip just means 'compressed' basically.

You can turn on gzip encoding in two ways - php manual has the preferred way as turning on the configuration option zlib.output_compression . You'd probably do this with an .htaccess file unless you have your own dedicated server (in which case you'd do it in the php.ini file). More on this way of doing it at [be2.php.net...]

it'd probably entail something like adding a line to your main .htaccess file:
php_flag zlib.output_compression on
I'm no expert on .htaccess files so test this out before you want to go live.

The other way to do this would be to find a php file that your script is always including before anything is output to the browser - a config file for example - or one that controls loading up modules - and put this at the top of it:
ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
This might be easier if you don't want to go messing with your .htaccess file. Problem is, it *must* be before any output occurs to the browser or you'll get header errors. Even a little white space before your opening <?php tag in any file that's included before this line can cause such a problem. More on this at [be2.php.net...]

Btw speed also has to do with how your page is built. If you have all your images properly sized, and it's just a matter of loading in images, it's possible that after just a few seconds your users have a fairly-well loaded page with all the info that they need, and won't mind if non-crucial images are loading up. Even more true if these are background images.

[Livenomadic]

The htaccess idea sounds good since it is simple enough for me to do.

Any htaccess experts know exactly how to go about this?

[drbrain]

In Apache2 you use mod_deflate, which is built-in:

[httpd.apache.org...]

Apache1 uses mod_gzip, which is a 3rd party module:

[schroepl.net...]