Topic: Joomla Plugin

Earlier this morning I noticed when the site was down the deckbox Joomla plugin was causing my website to load extremely slowly.  I went ahead and disabled the plugin.  Once it was disabled I noticed the pages were loading extremely quickly compared to before.  Even with the site working the plugin seems to slow down the loading time on my site.  I am curious as to what the plugin is going to get from deckbox.org.  I have re-enabled the plugin on my test site to see if there is a performance difference or if I am seeing something that isn't there.

My live site: www.gunslinger-games.com
My test site: www.gunslinger-games.com/testsite

Any information on what the plugin is doing when a page reloads would be helpful.

thank you in advance.

Re: Joomla Plugin

Hello,

The plugin itself does not fetch things from deckbox. It just parses your content to see if you are using any tags for card names. If you do have tags for card names, it preloads the images for them in the page. But this, as far as I know should not influence at all the speed with which your page loads.

The page rendering itself looks to be about the same for both links you provided, but it's a bit hard to tell because the load times vary quite a bit from one test to another.

ab -n 10 http://www.gunslinger-games.com/
Requests per second:    0.20 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       5127.014 [ms] (mean)

ab -n 10 http://www.gunslinger-games.com/testsite/
Requests per second:    0.23 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       4375.785 [ms] (mean)

ab -n 10 http://www.gunslinger-games.com/testsite/
Requests per second:    0.16 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       6254.322 [ms] (mean)


Did you see specific pages loading slower? Or generally you think it's slower?

Re: Joomla Plugin

The speed of the site might be in my head.  I was hoping a second opinion would verify that.  I currently don't have any links using the plugin.  I am working on some features that use it though.

I realized a few minutes ago I could look at the code of the plugin and see what it was doing.  It appears to be referencing  a javascript file from deckbox.

http://deckbox.org/javascripts/bin/tooltip.js

Also upon looking at that script it appears to reference several .css files for the tooltip and card output.  Is my browser pulling the java script into memory and the script is in turn loading the .css files it needs? 

Would it be possible to add these files to the Joomla plugin directly?  Anytime deckbox is not responsive the plugin is not going to find what it needs and is going to slow things down till it times out.  Or add a timeout to the plugin?

Re: Joomla Plugin

Yep, you are right, it loads a js file which in turn loads some css.

The reason why it's best loaded from us instead of your server is that we modify it sometimes to fix things, or to provide enhancements, and if you reference it from us you directly benefit from these changes with no other effort.

I'm pretty sure external scripts should not be slowing down pages even if they time out. For ex google and all advertisment networks load external resources constantly, and they don't slow provider websites down.

I could make a small test to see what happens when there the script times out to verify this I suppose.

Re: Joomla Plugin

JS files do load synchronously so if bandwidth issues exist between Deckbox.org and your site the browser will halt until it's done downloading.  That being said, I have been running a forum that loads the two different JS files from Deckbox.org and I haven't noticed any speed issues for at least the last year.  It's a low traffic site but still...

Re: Joomla Plugin

As far as I know external js does not block html content of the page from loading. It's possible that inline <script> tags in the content <body> behave as Tawnos explained, but scripts in <head> do not prevent page content to be displayed.

Re: Joomla Plugin

That is absolutely correct Sebi! I should have clarified the body/head condition in my prior post, sorry sad

Re: Joomla Plugin

Tawnos wrote:

That is absolutely correct Sebi! I should have clarified the body/head condition in my prior post, sorry sad

No prob, your observation was helpful, as I did not cover that in my explanation smile

Re: Joomla Plugin

I apologize it was not keeping the page from loading.  Deckbox not being available was causing the page to load very slowly.  Also keep in mind this was at 4 am and I assumed Deckbox servers were under maintenance of some type.

More than anything I was trying to figure out what the plugin was doing and now I know.  Thank you for the help :-)

Last edited by jnicholson56 (2012-04-20 01:39:14)