Browser speed problem

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Browser speed problem

Does IE have a problem with large tables?

snowfox121

1:47 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

I noticed something today when testing my site in Netscape 4.7. One page on my site contains a large table which takes about 20 seconds to load in IE 5. (i have DSL high speed access) In Netscape the same page takes about 1 second. The same thing happens when i use my navigational aid to go to another smaller table. IE takes 8 seconds and then 8 seconds to return when i click the back button. Netscape does it instantly. What's happening here?

The table is located on my profile site at /Wrpubs.htm

[edited by: tedster at 1:55 pm (utc) on July 17, 2002]
[edit reason] remove personal urls [/edit]

tedster

2:02 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

I'm going to look into this further for you. Opera nailed the page on a 56 dial-up in just a couple seconds - lots better than CNN.com!

It's about 158kb of HTML, and that includes lots of text, which gets native compression at the modem compared to, say 158kb of images or zip files. So I'd say there is something fishy happening to give the results you are seeing.

A quick fix - one I use a lot - is to break the table into several smaller ones. That way the top of the page often renders and is usable while the rest is still downloading.

[edited by: tedster at 2:07 pm (utc) on July 17, 2002]

BlobFisk

2:02 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

Not seeing that here - using IE6 on Win2000...

tedster

2:14 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

It took 8-9 seconds in IE6 for me - but that's on a dial-up! It should not take that long on DSL.

You might want to fix some small errors in the code (hex colors need a # and line breaks before the close quotes in some cases) but I doubt those are creating the trouble.

papabaer

2:30 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hello snowfox121, the page loaded quickly enough when viewed in Opera, though anytime page loading speed issues are broached, it is always a time to review the basics: divs render faster than tables, too much nesting of anything is bad, validate-validate-validate! And, use CSS!

Looking at the code for the footer links reveals a tremendous waste of kb: nested font tags!

All of the above is for a single link! You can save a tremdous amount of code and filesize by using CSS in place of the hundreds of font tags present on this page. The difference in rendering times will be noticeable in any combination of browser and Internet connection.

Best of luck!

creative craig

2:33 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

Took me about a second on a 1MB leased line at work :-)

Sinner_G

2:40 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

>><a href="some-link.htm">Some Link</a>

I have seen that kind of overkill when klicking the "save as HTML" button in word. But then wouldn't that mean the page would be faster with IE?

papabaer

3:20 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

...nope. The code still needs to be parsed. Even the best "speed reader" will see a difference between reading "War and Peace" and the "breakfast menu" from a discount motel. ;)

joshie76

6:50 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

It took me an awful long time to download the page (28.8k connection due to a dodgy phone line, help me...), but it rendered nice and snappy in IE6.

One thing I did notice when looking at your source code, is that the offending table had two columns, both with specified widths of 197 and 343 respectively.

An useful technique to increase rendering speed for such a table is to apply a fixed table layout like so...

<table ... style="table-layout:fixed">

This allows the table to start rendering immediately as it doesn't have to load up all the table data first to calculate the most appropriate column widths.

This is valid CSS and you can find out more about it on the W3C site's CSS level 2 - Tables [w3.org] and at MSDN [msdn.microsoft.com]

snowfox121

11:14 pm on Jul 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

Thank you to all who replied to this topic. i can see i have a night of work ahead of me -- not to mention a heck of a lot to learn about writing tight HTML. Cheers