On Dec 6, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Nathan Tallman wrote:

> Dave and Brian: I've been trying to avoid breaking the page into multiple
> files, but it may get to that point.  If I split the page into say three
> parts and then combined them on one page using the include function of PHP,
> would I still have to same problem?  I'll look into gzip too.

The two main contributors to load time are rendering speed and transmission speed.  Transmission speed is linear, but probably a small part of what you are experiencing.  I suspect that you are getting hit by rendering speed, which is heavily browser and page dependent.  Your only real solution is to either simplify your page so that it renders very easily or to split it up into smaller chunks that can be rendered quickly by the browser.  

Using PHP to split up the page into three parts will only slow you down, since instead of fetching one static page you'll have to process 3 scripts and render their result in one page.

Compression is only going to help you if your bottleneck is transmission speed.  Do some testing.  Use wget to see how long it takes to just fetch the page without rendering it.  If that is significant, then compression may help.  If the fetch happens quickly, compression will only slow you down since the overhead of compressing/decompressing will be greater than the savings in transmission.

r.