A friend of mine in Nairobi informed me today that my blog takes ages to load. Can anyone of you confirm this?
I already? tested my website with the free? webwait service (as pictured above), but I don’t know if this actually tests the speed time? my website takes to load (~ server response time, scripts, etc.), or just how fast my site loads with my current connection (speed).
Any feedback on the download/accessibility/site-loading speed is very much appreciated. Thank You!
AOB: MSIE 6.029 sux. big times!
My Internet access at home is via GPRS (EDGE actually) and I’ve gotten, after 5 runs, 31.56 secs. But don’t use my experience as common.
Then again, your friend is in Nairobi…
You got 9.29s from Melbourne.
2nd try to post this comment:
You got 9.29s from Melbourne/Australia.
Not too bad compared to the 73.24s m.zung.us takes from here.
My own site http://www.fiftyeight.net takes about 3.34s
3rd try to post this comment:
You got 9.29s from Melbourne/Australia.
Not too bad compared to the 73.24s m.zung.us takes from here.
My own site http://www.fiftyeight.net takes about 3.34s
I didn’t count the secs but your site takes a quite a bit longer than most but again this is Nairobi and even worse I am in a cyber!
Sorry for the triplet there JKE. Bit of a strange phenomenon.
Hey guys, thx for the feedback!!
Now I think the database powering this blog is already optimized, but I guess the delay happens due to javascripts that are running here and there. Damn it. Maybe I should move them to the footer section?
58/Chris: the spam classification is due to your use of “58”. I am only using Akismet, so these guys over at WP apparently don’t like you??? :-)
Yeah, I figured. That’s why I used Christoph with the 3rd try – which went through. Good to know.
It does take a while, but i thought that was because my connections suck!
i *hear* that virtually every website takes forever to load in KE. Take a look at this link on things that affect internet access in African countries: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/business/yourmoney/22rwanda.html
Rateng, thx, isn’t this the article Hash mentioned the other day?
As for speeding up the blog, now what I did so far was to cut out all javascript counters (google analytics, gmaps, etc.) from the header and pasting them into the footer section. This should speed up the site loading process, although i guess this also depends on the used browser. Also, I’ve made sure to relocate the banners and logos exclusively to kikuyumoja.com so that there’s almost only one server request.
Afrigator, for instance – i am using their invisible gif with zero width and height to add the counter functionality and the logo is loaded extra from my site (whereas it would normally serve to track traffic). And I didn’t do this for David Kobia’s mashada logo as I didn’t know if he’s using any script on his site to analyze that traffic (you hear me, bro? :-).
Speaking of slow Internet access, or lack thereof, I’ve been searching for this info: last year (or 2005?) there was a hackers’ conference in Europe where it was noted that they had more bandwidth available in that one building than in all of Africa. When this factoid was presented to one of the conf. organizer, he was visibly very embarassed by it. Anyone know which conference this was?
That was the Chaos Communication Camp, organised by the (German) Chaos Computer Club, if I remember it well.
Can’t have been: the Camp last was held in 2003, and the event I described happened either Q1-2007, last year, or no later than 2005. I’ll get back to ya when I find out more.
Yeah, you’re right. It must have been the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress then and Tim Pritlove who said that “we’re having a better connection to the net than Africa”.
Danke. I think his statement became viral for future cons, as I’m sure my event happened last year, and not in 2005 as I thought. I found one ‘viral’ reference —here.