Page loads abnormally slowly for no apparant reason

[james_littler]

i have recently constructed a site that all seems to work beautifully in all browsers, however i do have one issue, and that is with the load speed of the page.

in ff the page loads quickly, the layout is instantly visable and the only things that slow the page down are the images aligned right, these load after the actual page so this is no problem (the wait is only 3 or 4 seconds after the page load until all images are viewable)

in ie7 the page loads very slowly, the main page content isnt visable for a good 10 seconds, i believed the reason for this was the large file size of my flash header but i have reduced this to 300k and it seems to have made no difference to the load speed

all my code is xhtml 1.0 transitional (checked by validator.w3)

LIVE EXAMPLE:

http://www.ats-heritage.co.uk/div/Re...testindex.html

i have absolutely no idea what is causing this to happen, any ideas would be appreciated greatly...

thankyou

[Type-O]

The problem occurs here too (IE7). I see that the Flash elements have to be clicked to be activated (IE eolas stuff). Not that they seem to serve navigational purposes but I'd say it's better anyway to place them using (for instance) SWFObject.

To eliminate the Flash elements as possible source of the delay i'd say, comment them out first and then change them too be placed with SWFobject.

[james_littler]

the flash objects do have to be clicked to be used...this is a security feature of ie so that you cannot load malicious code, if you hover over a video you will see the control come up on that to, but, as it is only playing a video it isnt noticed...

[Nadia P]

"Page not found"/ 300k is still fairly large in size... and will take some time to download I'm afraid.

Do you use Firefox... and the web developer toolbar? If so, there is an option there somewhere to test the page of optimisation... (under Tools>View Speed Report) and that will tell you exactly how long it takes a page to load and what you need to optimse for faster loading pages.

Nadia

[james_littler]

thats a really good idea cheers...i think ive found the problem i was using a method of embeding or rather..not embeding a flash element so as it would pass xhtml 1.0 validation, this involved removing the classid attribute from the object tag and replacing it with a data attribute, although this gets past the validation it makes everything hellishly slow if using ie...(i take it numbers are faster than their alphaneumeric src)

if you know of an alternate method of including flash without using the embed attribute that may just do it.....

[james_littler]

right for anyone in the same boat as me this code works beautifully in all browsers i have tried and passes xhtml 1.0 as valid

<!--[if !IE]> -->

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

data="movie.swf" width="300" height="135">

<!-- <![endif]-->



<!--[if IE]>

<object classid="clsid:d27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"

codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0"

width="300" height="135">

<param name="movie" value="movie.swf" />

<!--><!---->

<param name="loop" value="true" />

<param name="menu" value="false" />



<p>This is <strong>alternative</strong> content.</p>

</object>

<!-- <![endif]-->

this was the result of about 2 hours in google so i hope this helps

[logic_earth]

...this is a security feature of ie so that you cannot load malicious code, if you hover over a video you will see the control come up on that to, but, as it is only playing a video it isnt noticed...

No this is not a security feature, Microsoft was involved in a lawsuit with Eolas over patent violations. And now ActiveX content cannot be run automatically without the user starting it or by including it via a program method.

The best way to include flash or any other form of plugin item is to use JavaScript like SWFObject.