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- Apr 24, 2013
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First of all i'd just like to say i'm really loving star-made and even though I only recently discovered it a week ago i've already sunk over 20 hours into it. Hopefully that statemant has softened you up a bit so you won't hate the everloving crap out of me for what i'm about to say next.
I'm sure you guys are really working on star-made it self but accessing the site is really, really slow (at least for me) and there's a number of simple improvements that can be made that will increase the load speed of the site 10 fold with very little work involved so I figured i'd put them out there since i'm a bit OCD when it comes to site performance, especially since we're living in the day and age of the "I want it now" level of patience. (see this infographic for why)
You know it's especially bad when your sites being ranked as slower than 84% of websites by pingdom tools.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/NIzr8ko6T/star-made.org
Anyways, on to the simplest fixes of the bunch.
1. Merge all of the CSS files into one single file and minify said file (merge & minify your on-site JS files as well).
There's a lot of extra requests going on for CSS files with-in the head tag that don't need to be done. A single CSS file would do the job just as well and would be a lot faster to load than 29 individual css files, and minifying the resulting file would no doubt improve the file size even further. (For reference most of the CSS files I minify for production sites give a 50-70% decrease in file size on average).
2. Remove this tag as it can lag out some browsers
3. Get rid of all the unused javascript/CSS files
Lots of random files that aren't used in any of the pages are being loaded & should probably be removed completely.
4. Load as many Javascript files on the site from an off-site CDN as possible
http://cdnjs.com is amazing!
It's fast, it's free, it's run by the guys that do Cloudflare and it's also faster than Google's hosted libraries, use it.
5. Compress all the main site imagery (logo, background images etc) using an online service like TinyPNG or a program like RIOT
These might be worth using on some of the in-game textures as well. I used TinyPNG on the block textures with good results (65% decrease in file size with no visual change in-game) but compressing some of the other image files created startup errors. I'm not very experienced with image compression outside of web use so who knows.
6. Use Cloudflare!
The free plan is great, and nearly as fast as the paid versions - I guarantee even the free plan will make your site significantly faster. Moving your site to their DNS servers is an exceptional way of supercharging your site even if you don't plan on using their built in caching service.
DNS benchmark for this month from an outside source (click here for full page results):
There's lots of other things you can do as well but these will definitely give you the most noticeable work/performance improvement ratio aside from recoding the entire site to be as barebones as possible and switching to an Nginx + MariaDB + APC Cache (or something similar) + W3 Total Cache + Wordpress setup. (which, by the way if you're interested in doing just that i've had a lot of success recently with the Bones Theme Framework for Wordpress).
If you need help with any of this let me know, i'd love to volunteer my services and help out in any way I can.
That's my spiel for the day, Keep up the great work!
I'm sure you guys are really working on star-made it self but accessing the site is really, really slow (at least for me) and there's a number of simple improvements that can be made that will increase the load speed of the site 10 fold with very little work involved so I figured i'd put them out there since i'm a bit OCD when it comes to site performance, especially since we're living in the day and age of the "I want it now" level of patience. (see this infographic for why)
You know it's especially bad when your sites being ranked as slower than 84% of websites by pingdom tools.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/NIzr8ko6T/star-made.org
Anyways, on to the simplest fixes of the bunch.
1. Merge all of the CSS files into one single file and minify said file (merge & minify your on-site JS files as well).
There's a lot of extra requests going on for CSS files with-in the head tag that don't need to be done. A single CSS file would do the job just as well and would be a lot faster to load than 29 individual css files, and minifying the resulting file would no doubt improve the file size even further. (For reference most of the CSS files I minify for production sites give a 50-70% decrease in file size on average).
2. Remove this tag as it can lag out some browsers
3. Get rid of all the unused javascript/CSS files
Lots of random files that aren't used in any of the pages are being loaded & should probably be removed completely.
4. Load as many Javascript files on the site from an off-site CDN as possible
http://cdnjs.com is amazing!
It's fast, it's free, it's run by the guys that do Cloudflare and it's also faster than Google's hosted libraries, use it.
5. Compress all the main site imagery (logo, background images etc) using an online service like TinyPNG or a program like RIOT
These might be worth using on some of the in-game textures as well. I used TinyPNG on the block textures with good results (65% decrease in file size with no visual change in-game) but compressing some of the other image files created startup errors. I'm not very experienced with image compression outside of web use so who knows.
6. Use Cloudflare!
The free plan is great, and nearly as fast as the paid versions - I guarantee even the free plan will make your site significantly faster. Moving your site to their DNS servers is an exceptional way of supercharging your site even if you don't plan on using their built in caching service.
DNS benchmark for this month from an outside source (click here for full page results):
There's lots of other things you can do as well but these will definitely give you the most noticeable work/performance improvement ratio aside from recoding the entire site to be as barebones as possible and switching to an Nginx + MariaDB + APC Cache (or something similar) + W3 Total Cache + Wordpress setup. (which, by the way if you're interested in doing just that i've had a lot of success recently with the Bones Theme Framework for Wordpress).
If you need help with any of this let me know, i'd love to volunteer my services and help out in any way I can.
That's my spiel for the day, Keep up the great work!
