Not Only Smarter, Faster

Now that Smart Space is working solidly, I have now provided and even greater boost to speed than was already available. Previously I have fine tuned the database system to perform as well as possible and kept the code as light weight as I could to acheive what was required on each page, but the latest update has taken the speed to a new level.

Based on the Yahoo! YSlow measure, one of the industry benchmarks, an average booking page was rated at about 70(C). This is well above the average speed for website which is typically 50 - 60 for many large websites. As you can see in the screenshot above, with a range of strategies, it has now risen to an the industry Gold Standard of around 90(A).

The effect it has on download speeds will vary depending on your bandwidth, your download rate, server load and other factors out of the control of Smart Space, but a 100% inprovement in the time a page takes to load will be achieved by many.

The improvement has been acheived with a few improvements, but the big factors were compression and caching. This means that the html in the pages loaded by your computer are a lot smaller than were the case previously. You browser then uncompresses the pages and shows them to you how they were meant to be.

Your computer also stores some files which affect the look and performance of the website much better, requiring fewer call backs to the server, thus taking less time to load.

The latest improvements mean even greater efficiency when using Smart Space above other systems.