Page loading. hardware issues, pipelin issues?

Why would my core HTML page take so long to load?

[Onders]

I've run a few tests to look into page loading and I'm having a bit of trouble attributing some of the results..

I've got a relatively small file size overall, relatively small images, a reasonable decent dedicated server (P4 3.0Ghz).. but the page load time of the core html page is really long. I don't have many external scripts and the DB can't really be having an impact. Any ideas on what could be causing this? Also what seems a bit rubbish is that all the images aren’t then downloaded in parallel, but in batches...

Would be grateful if anyone knows anything about this, and has any ideas..

Thanks!

[kaled]

The only way to diagnose any problem of this sort is to make two copies of the page. In each copy, comment out different halves of the code. Hopefully, one copy will load as expected and one copy will load slowly. However, if both load slowly, you will need to reduce one down until full speed is achieved. You can then "home in" on the problem.

Kaled.

[SEOMike]

Once I accidentally left a high-res image that was being resized by the browser. The image was over a meg. Fixing that really changed the load time.

Do you have anything like flash or java on the page? Have you checked that there aren't any problems in that code and that it's written for the latest versions?

Is your page dynamically generated? Maybe there's a problem there.

Have you considered using subdomains to load images and scripts? This will allow browsers to do a kind of multi-threading. I use this sometimes for pages with a lot of images.

Have you tried different browsers and machines?

Do all the pages load slowly or just the homepage?

What happens if you visit with scripts disabled?

I agree with kaled, start commenting out sections of code and see if you can isolate the trouble spot.

[Onders]

Thanks guys - I'm building a test sheet to effectively break down all the possibilities, will report back here when all tests completed.

In answer to your questions SEOMike, no flash or Java, not dynamically generated, all the pages load slowly, and I haven't tried disabling scripts yet.

Two of my concerns were the server and the location of the server. The audience is UK based, but server is on West Coast of the US. I've tested on different servers (in UK and US) now and the loading is fairly similar. So those things ruled out.

I've still got four javasrcipt files being called from the top of the page, and a design which includes both tables and divs. Going to sort these things out next and see what effect is.

Likewise, will get my images called from somewhere else to set up more connections.

Thanks so far for your help everyone.