In case any of you were wondering what all the activity was about today, with strange behavior occurring around the icons and lightboxes and things, let me explain. This week is "Optimization Week" for me and I've been doing a lot of background changes to the site that are meant to make it much faster. None of the work really has a visible effect, but it does have a huge effect in terms of performance.

For example, all the icons you see here and there used to be individual files, and in order to load a page on ATP your browser had to download each and every icon and graphic individually.

On some pages, like threads, the microbadges that show up in our profiles can number into the dozens or even over a hundred different microbadges. Each badge forced a different connection to the server and that adds up to slow down your experience at ATP.

So, today I (mostly) finished my work of converting the microbadges and other icons into a single image. Your browser downloads the image once and then stores it in your cache, and then forever after it can display all the microbadges without ever having to download them again. The technique is called CSS spriting and it should have a huge impact on your performance. Even if you don't directly notice it, having a page load go from 1 second to 0.5 seconds is a gigantic improvement.

So, all the chaos from earlier today was worth the effort.

I think you should get applause not only for making faster today, but even more so for it being feature-rich AND fast ALREADY.

Notice how there are no "agonized" groans about speeding it up "at last" or 'can't you make it even faster?"

I bet a lot of people aren't posting their private reactions, which were:
"I thought it was ALREADY fast!"

Edited to add: I forgot to say "Thank you". Thank you!

RickCorey said:I bet a lot of people aren't posting their private reactions, which were:"I thought it was ALREADY fast!"

ATP has always seemed very fast on my laptop. but Dave, I do thank you for all of your hard work in making sure things run so smoothly and at an optimum level for us!

I knew it couldn't just be my computer running faster!!

Thanks Dave!

Is this the reason that the page keeps loading and loading and loading? I can't refresh a page until I click on the "x" ("Stop loading this page") first.

That's a new one and it shouldn't be happening. I'm not sure what's up with that. Is there anything on your status bar indicating that it's downloading something?

Oh, yes. I didn't notice. It's perennially "transferring data from google-analytics," so it has nothing to do with the site and must be happening everywhere I go.

That's the logging feature that we use to record how many visitors we get each day. I've seen it get hung up before but it shouldn't affect the actual use of the site. If it does, please do let me know!

It's not affecting anything but the little green circle that keeps going round and round. I have the same thing happening with Cubits. It doesn't bother me. I just wondered about the cause.

zuzu said:It's not affecting anything but the little green circle that keeps going round and round. I have the same thing happening with Cubits. It doesn't bother me. I just wondered about the cause.

If it becomes a problem, let me know.

>> "transferring data from google-analytics,"

A week or four ago, I kept hanging on that for 10-20 seconds at a time. perhaps 6 times per day, for several days. It went away, I have not seen it since.

Okay, Dave. I'll let you know if it causes any problems.

Rick, it isn't hanging. The page loads immediately, but the green circle keeps rotating forever. It does it on every page except when I'm previewing a post.

Ahh. For me, it prevented any click anywhere in the site from having an effect. I forget whether I could click outside ATP and do other things.

But as I say, "it went away".

Since it lets Dave keep track of things here, no problem. When I thought it was Google taking 100% of my CPU cycles to log my browsing history, I was less happy.

I made it go away. My Avira software was blocking all the tracking companies, so I created exceptions for ATP and Cubits and the sites now work the way they always did.

!

I wondered if our IT department was somehow to blame!

I figured when things were happening that our magician Dave was hard at work tweaking things. He's always making things better & better for us.

Thank you Dave.

And it's so cool that you tell us what has been happening. I've not been on any sites where that happens.

I SO agree!!!!

Is there any particular reason that the text is now clear at the bottom of the square with our avatar and any badges? Looks like there is no text, just an empty "text box" until you scroll way down. Very strange. Hard to follow, too.

Thank you so much Dave for all the cool updates and for all the work you do to make ATP bigger, better, and faster!