Internet Access Speeds - Java Compression

eyeargan

Generally, I find my Aware screens openly slowly on my development machine.
I am worried about how they will be served over the net.

How can I make them run faster?
Is Java Compression with tools like ShrinkSafe from Dojo possible?

Thanks

aware_support2

When you publish a business space version (either in main or test mode) the system needs to generate a form page before displaying object data for the first time. This may explain the initial slow loading of pages. Each form is generated only once though, so the next time the page should be displayed much faster.

You can have a look at live sample applications accessible via our web site for an idea of page loading speed over the Internet.

Elmar

I just answered this question a few threads further down CLICK. It has nothing to do with Java compression but rather client side Javascripts and Stylesheets.

Strangely enough no one replied to this thread so from reading your question I assume that I did not write it very understandable for average users.

In short: AwareIM resulting web pages are too big because of uncompressed scripts. You can see that with their examples on the web or with your own. Get a Tool like Firebug for Firefox Browser and analyze what gets downloaded to the client when you request a standard AwareIM page.

Compression in means of deleting comments and whitespaces in these files shrinks the overall delivery packet size in half! There are one or two scripts in AwareIM that needs some tweaking before they can be compressed but in general its a piece of cake. Just be sure to not touch the original version so that you can always go back.

It would be a huge improvement to AwareIM´s performance at a very low price if that would be integrated right into the product.

What do you think?

Regards,
Elmar

pbrad

Elmar,
This forum is graciously provided by AwareIM in order for them to assist users with working solutions, not for you to shamelessly plug your products. If people didn't respond to you it is for two reasons. One, your post was of a marketing nature and 2. It is not that it is not understandable by average users, it is not understandable by anyone that speaks the english language. I hope that you take more effort in writing your programming language than you do in writing the english language.

Once AwareIM has iniitally cached each form it runs like a bullet from my experience.

Elmar

pbrad,

This forum is graciously provided by AwareIM in order for them to assist users with working solutions, not for you to shamelessly plug your products

My products? Firbug and other products like jsmin are open source and I just mentioned them to help people to get more performance. I am not related to any of these projects wahtsoever.

It is not that it is not understandable by average users, it is not understandable by anyone that speaks the english language.

I deeply regret that english is not my mother tongue - sorry, for not belonging to the same elite as you. I wasn´t aware that my english is that bad.

Once AwareIM has iniitally cached each form it runs like a bullet from my experience

Good for you. I have been working in the web industry for 10 years now and we use profiling and performance tools for page optimization on every project because -after all- size does matter alot. Loading 500k takes takes considerably longer than loading 250k.

Well, no worries - from now on I will keep these things to myself to not confuse you even more.

All the best,
Elmar

bkonia

Elmar,

I don't know why pbrad was so rude to you, but I can assure you, he does not represent most of the users on this forum. I did not get the impression that you were trying to plug any products and I found your English to be perfectly understandable.

I also happen to agree with your assertion that pages generated by Aware IM are somewhat heavy and would benefit from compression. However, I noticed that you can enable GZIP compression in the Tomcat configuration file, server.xml. With GZIP enabled, I would think that would automatically compress all the redundant spaces, comments, etc... and would be a lot easier than going through each of the script files and doing this manually.

Also, I assume that these scripts are frequently updated by the Aware IM development team whenever new versions are released, which would mean that you would have to repeat the manual compression process every time the script was updated.

pbrad

My apologies, I obviously misread your intentions. Again, sorry, I must have been having a bad day.
Cheers.

Elmar

Ok, I´m glad we got that sorted.

GZIP is a good thing and ourdays every browser supports realtime decompression. Anyhow GZIP was invented even before HTML and probably Javascript existed so in some projects it proved not as efficient as specialized compressors which do a lot of other neat things (there are other pages that explain that better than I do) with the sources.

Also, I assume that these scripts are frequently updated by the Aware IM development team whenever new versions are released, which would mean that you would have to repeat the manual compression process every time the script was updated.

True, but normally I would just write one batch script once that traverses through all directories and runs compression on every compressible file. That way nothing has to be compressed by the server and decompressed in realtime by the browser. The other advantage is that the Javascript code is kind of obfuscated which becomes more and more important as DHTML/Javascript has its revival as AJAX.

If I find some time in the next days I will to a performance comparison of an "untouched" AwareIM CRM application, a GZIPed and an file compressed version.

pbrad

Thanks for accepting my apology, I feel badly about it. Best of luck.
Pete

bkonia

Elmar wrote
If I find some time in the next days I will to a performance comparison of an "untouched" AwareIM CRM application, a GZIPed and an file compressed version.

Yes, I would be very interested to see the results of this comparison.

eyeargan

Thanks to all of your for this discussion surrounding my question.
I am VERY new at all this, however, so I was hoping that someone could explain how to enable GZIP in my Tomcat configuration.

Also, while researching jsmin, I discovered a shrinksafe from Dojo.
It seems interesting as well.

In any case, I still don't know how to go about "cleaning" the files that Aware creates. I am just too inexperienced.

So, for now, I would like to rely on GZIP if someone can explain to me how to enable it.

Cheers,
Erik

bkonia

eyeargan wrote
So, for now, I would like to rely on GZIP if someone can explain to me how to enable it.

Hi Erik,

To enable GZIP, open the file server.xml, which is located in your AwareIM/Tomcat/conf directory. Next, look for the following section in the file:

Edit that section, so it looks like this:

<Connector port="8080"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" acceptCount="100"
debug="0" connectionTimeout="20000"
disableUploadTimeout="true"
compression="on"
compressionMinSize="2048"
noCompressionUserAgents="gozilla, traviata"
compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml" />

Then, just restart Tomcat and you should be good to go.

eyeargan

Great, thanks!

Out of curiosity, why isn't this enabled by default?

Erik