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Thursday 10th Nov 2011 20:40:55
Compression, transmission
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Blimey - why didn't I do this ages and ages ago? Do what, you may well ask. Well, I've had friends politely point out that it takes a very looooooooong time to download pictures from my web-site. Pin-pointing the exact cause of delay was trivial, but I just never got around to it. Okay, so . . . you got a picture to download, which could vary in size from under 1MB up to 6MB (possibly more). I think my upload rate is about 1Mb/s. So, in ideal conditions a 1MB picture would take about 8 seconds (remembering there are 8 bits in a byte) to upload. So, let's shift the pictures to a web hosting company, who promise super fast upload/download rates. Okay, done (well, actually more like 'in the process of doing'). Hmmmm, but to re-size that 6MB picture takes a lot of memory, more than my web-hosting company are willing to provide (the limit is 64MB, which isn't enough). So, we reduce very slightly the quality of the pictures, such that the loss of quality is almost imperceptible but the size of the images is considerably reduced. Suddenly, the maximum size of an image is just over 1MB, so we're looking at 10 seconds, say, to upload the largest image. But then, what's this - why is it still taking so long? Hmmmmm. Turns out that stupid little table displaying 'hits' for the image displayed was taking a long time to generate. So, turn it off, try again. And suddenly . . . it all seems uncannily fast. There's still a long way to go yet, but I'm happy. Check it out yourself, if you're bothered. Try clicking on an image and see if it seems any better.
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