Now, I try to stay away from such technical subjects, but I’m just wondering: Is there any way to make our web applications go faster? Why do sites like Wikipedia and other content-rich tools (like Confluence, for all you TWers) have to load soooooooooooooooo slooooooooowly? It really inhibits my attention span.
3 responses to “Why can’t we find a way to speed up web apps?”
upgrade now! 😉
d’oh.
<span type=”attention” version=”2.0″>upgrade now!</span> 😉
Web apps really can only go as fast as the web can carry them. You still have to pull all the data (text + images as is the case with wikiepdia) over the WAN, whether that’s across the country or across the world. You could always petition Wikipedia to mirror their site from somewhere closer to you. {;o)
Some webified applications (I’m referring to those crazy enterprise type apps like SAP or Oracle CRM type things) are extermely chatty, so they suck even more because they have to make that round trip so many more times.
HTTP has some built in compression, which helps a bit.
Caching is anothero ption. Caching objects and keeping the cache close to you is a great way to speed things up, however, it’s static and only works well if everyone near you goes to the same website over and over.
Interestingly enough, my company has several solutions to these problems…haha