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Speed matters. Why don't other sites get this?

blogs.smugmug.com — I spend a lot of time optimizing our site for speed - and the customer payoff is huge. I spend almost as much time wishing other sites would do the same thing. Alexa says our pages take .9 seconds, median, to load. Let's see how the other big photo sharing sites stack up, shall we?

Who dugg this? Made popular May 16, 2007

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  • Azimuth1, on 10/11/2007, -6/+62Why did you use Comic Sans for your logo?
  • superal1394, on 10/11/2007, -3/+50I would. Digg is painfully slow for me. I only stay because the content is so good.

    So, here I go;

    Dear Digg,
    Please speed up your site

    thanks

    ~~-Ali
  • outhouseinput, on 10/11/2007, -0/+36Flickr links off of Digg usually take upwards of 5-10 seconds to load for me. I don't know about anyone else.
  • outhouseinput, on 10/11/2007, -1/+30Digg is pretty slow for me to load. It's almost laggy sometimes.
  • fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -2/+30I can't believe it only takes 3.8 seconds for Alexa to load a page on digg. I want their connection / computers.
  • anaesthetica, on 10/11/2007, -2/+28Oh, wouldn't you know. Digg registers as "Slow" according to Alexa's speed tool. Average load time of 3.8 seconds. 75% of sites are faster than Digg. Who would have guessed?

    http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=digg.com&url=digg.com/
  • fober, on 10/11/2007, -2/+21What a civil conversation between competing site chiefs in the comments section!
  • inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+14Who would have guessed? Pretty much EVERYBODY who has used Digg for more than 2 days would have guessed.

    3.6 seconds is being EXTREMELY generous to digg. Obviously they were not checking pages with more than 60 comments. And any one with more than 150 comments often takes 5-10 times that long to load.
  • djbelieve, on 10/11/2007, -5/+18Uh...isn't this post kind of like...um, spam?
  • pcrow, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10I don't find the load times a Digg to be unreasonable. What I find to be a pain is the rendering time. When I hit ctrl-tab and cycle through my tabs, it always hangs for a few seconds on Digg. I'm guessing that there's a lot of Java Script code, but it's really slow, even with a Core 2.
  • onethumb, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9I think you're confused about what "my site" is. Maybe you should learn to read first? Or do you really think I have 150,000,000 images around because I'm not an image site?
  • blog4charity, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8Ok so it matters. But how did you make it fast?
  • GeneralKickass, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8But that's what she said.
  • StealthGod, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Smugmug paying subscriber and loving it. Don't even get me started on alternatives like Flickr... what crap.

    Bring the fast load times!
  • RunOut, on 10/11/2007, -3/+9People are willing to wait for good content
  • spucky, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Digg is also terribly slow for me. Sometimes it takes upwards of 5 seconds to open a buried comment. This is on Firefox/Ubuntu. On Opera/Windows it is much faster and smoother. I don't know what is going on, but I would think Kevin Rose would be sensitive to performance problems with one of the largest Linux contingencies and be working on it - hopefully...
  • Spiffness, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5In this day and age, I load everything in a new tab on FF. Usually with all the tabs and pages I have loading in the background a site can take a reasonable amount of time to open and I'd never notice the difference.
  • cyberfelon, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5I'm definitely going to email this to the other developers at work. More people need to know that SmugMug loads in 0.9 seconds.
  • davidjunit, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5True, I get frustrated waiting for sites to load and it's sometimes an ad server keeping the site from further loading. I may return later but may just leave for good and forget about the site.
  • ibis, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6I've always found flickr to be crushingly slow. To the point that I've stopped using it and I'm annoyed when someone links to an image on flickr.
  • tgelston, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Another happy smugmug customer here. Their map API is pretty damn sweet.
  • ahhell, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5"Alexa says.." this thread fails at life.
  • inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3If only KEVIN ROSE understood this.
  • shimamoto, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4I'll wait half a second longer if I don't have to look at a black background. My pupils don't appreciate the exercise.

  • Phil246, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Looking at the net trace on firebug, it takes 13.44s for this page to load for me. it makes 78 requests just to load the page with all elements - pulling down 188kb ( of which 35 was retrieved from cache )
    the main reason for the long load times appears to be the images, its taking somewhere around 2-4 seconds to download a 2kb image and in one case, it takes 8s for a 44 byte image to be retrieved.
    Thats just nuts, it leads me to think that the major bottleneck for digg is the image server it uses rather then any javascript download and execution times
  • morningmatters, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Interesting stuff here. I always thought JPGs does not compress well and this is a media heavy site so I wonder how does the site reduce page load times.

    On the other hand, the site uses Alexa in order to get feedback on average page load times. Since Alexa toolbar sites on top of the client's browser I would think the page load times are more or less accurate. This sounds like a good end user experience solution for smaller companies.
  • retral, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4Seems a lot slower than flickr and whatnot now that digg is sending it a competitive amount of users.
  • baddog121390, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3"Digg is also terribly slow for me. Sometimes it takes upwards of 5 seconds to open a buried comment. This is on Firefox/Ubuntu. On Opera/Windows it is much faster and smoother. I don't know what is going on, but I would think Kevin Rose would be sensitive to performance problems with one of the largest Linux contingencies and be working on it - hopefully..."

    Opera is a lot faster at rendering javascript than firefox is
  • m00nmaster, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2God, I hate that font. It is so 1994.
  • shibbay, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2I use

    http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php

    to check on the page load stats...and a bunch of other ones too. It's really helpful for diagnosing a site's weaknesses.
  • niczar, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Digg is quite fast for me in Paris. At least, I don't notice speed as a problem. I have an ADSL2+ connection.

    Flickr is painfully sloooow on the other hand. They really need to do something about it, it's not like they don't have the $$ to buy servers / bandwidth.
  • starbirix, on 10/11/2007, -3/+4I'll promote this article and SmugMug by extension because I certainly appreciate giving speed attention.
  • HigherLogic, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Digg could really benefit from a light-weight version for their website. Perhaps something in your preferences to disable all the "snazzy" Ajax features. That's the real culrpit behind Digg's extremely slow website (try opening a couple links and watch your resources shoot up).
  • flap, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Just for kicks I tested the speed of a smugmug users page and a flickr user page.

    flickr was faster.
  • bigwebguy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Photobucket and other "free" sites are also Ad supported and either owned by huge companies with deep pockets (Kodak, HP, Yahoo) or have VC backing.

    SmugMug has none of the above.
  • inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Thats what your hosts file is for silly!!
  • merreborn, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1For PHP, installing a caching compiler like APC yields similar gains. Our app also does a lot of work with database metadata, which it fetches via some SHOW TABLE statements, etc. Caching that data brought load times down by a second. Total speedup from just those two optimizations was 20x (1000 ms -> 50 ms).

    Moral of the story: figure out exactly which things are sucking up the bulk of your page load times, and fix them, and them only. All the micro-optimizations in the world wouldn't have ever given that much of a boost.
  • navtejkohli, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1And look at that, it still loads quickly when it's on Digg. Although, in reality, it wouldn't matter if a page loaded instantaneously: if the content sucks, no one cares. It still took those precious 2.1 seconds to figure out that the site was a load of crap.

    I'm also not saying that SmugMug is a load of crap. But if xxhotgurlinfla6969's myspace page took .03 seconds to load, it'd still be awful.
  • jmnormand, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1may just be the extra traffic but yes it is significantly slower than flickr at the moment...
  • dangsta, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2photobucket and the other sites are also free.. i'd expect a site im paying for to be a lot faster.
  • bigwebguy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0@Phil246

    Firebug has a bug where it won't report gzipped content as being pulled from cache. So more content may be getting cached than what Firebug is reporting.
  • Piggycow, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Well their site didn't load in .9 seconds for me, more like 2 or 3 so I don't know where their numbers come from
  • CrimsonBlur, on 10/11/2007, -4/+2I don't know how Alexa is getting these statistics on site speed, and neither does the submitter, but my Flickr home page loads faster than his Popular Photos page right now on my work computer, and I've tested it multiple times including clearing the cache. My Flickr home page contains more content, images and features, and the site gets more traffic in general, yet it still loads faster. Maybe instead of running his mouth off about the performance of his site and spamming Digg with his thoughts on the matter he should make sure he isn't full of ***** first. He also needs to get a reality check: it doesn't matter if your site loads fast if it sucks compared to the competition.

    I'm not saying site speed isn't important, but for what Flickr does it loads perfectly fast on the computers I've used, I've never thought it loaded slowly at all compared to sites with similar content and features.
  • flap, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1This is kind of silly. Yes it is great to have fast loading times, but you can't directly compare sites unless they have the exact same content. If that were the case then you get to brag about speed.
  • xenoploid, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Flickr still rules all, even if it is slow as *****.
  • swindmill, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Will someone forward this t-mobile? It takes me 5 minutes to pay a bill.
  • fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2My guess is they just do a rqeuest of the url and time it. They probably don't factor in CSS, JavaScript or the actual time between the html being downloaded and all the additional fluff being rendered or executed.
  • scotch232, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1this suks
  • SuperJason, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1Two can play that game. http://www.RankTrend.com is fast. (actually, it really is)

    Hey, at least my digg down rate be a new record!
  • geronimo, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1I was just working on making some j2ee stuff faster. My trick is enabling the hibernate object cache and making it work for objects and queries. It is now 3 times faster(300ms->100ms), just by fiddling with XML. 10 years ago I could only dream of this day.
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