AOL Browser very very slow for some customers

AOL 9 appears to cause very slow download of images

[rikh]

We have been getting complaints from a few customers over the last couple of months. They all use AOL 9. It only appears to be some AOL customers that get the problem though.

The web site appears to download very very slowly for these customers when they use the AOL browser (switching to IE on their connection results in normal speed again). They claim it is only happening on our web site.

I have managed to witness this now, and it certainly does happen. We use quite a lot of background images on the site and it appears to take several minutes to download them, giving up completely for some of them. It is not a performance problem at the server, as this is running fine and simply switching to IE or firefox on the problem machines solves the problem.

Normally I would say "well, your using AOL, what do you expect", but there are too many of them with the same problem and it does make the site really unusable.

Has anyone else seen this problem?
Does anyone have any suggestions on solving this? (other than telling customers to use IE)

[tedster]

My first guess would be the problem lies at the AOL caching servers [webmaster.info.aol.com]. AOL users do not get a direct connection to your server, but instead get their requests handled by this intermediary approach.

As to a fix, well maybe the link I gave will suggest an approach for you.

[thecoalman]

To the best of my knowledge IE doesn't cache background images and unless I'm out of the loop AOL is still using IE as a backend?

Maybe it's a combination of what Tedster suggested and the IE no cache. Try putting them in a hidden <div> which will force IE(AOL browser) to cache them. Might not help with the initial page load but subsequent pages will be faster. I do this with all my background images.

[Xapti]

Compress your images to a smaller size... and when possible, put many images together, and just change the background position to call different images.

Also try having interlacing disabled on the images.

Other things causing bloat may be too many elements on a page (hundreds of table cells/divs, long select menus) or javascript.