I have a friend that is making a portfolio site. He has some high res images that he would like to display. There will be multiple projects on one page, and several images per project. Because of this, he would like to reduce load time as much as possible, and also conserve system memory usage. That being said, he's afraid that a conventional jQuery slider will eat up too much memory if it's called multiple times on the same page. Also, to load all of the images at initialization is just not an option as this would create long load times. Does anyone know of any image sliders, either jQuery or HTML5, or both that can help with this?
before spending time searching for a good jQuery slider...
...start from the basis:
start following general web design best practices like theese
keep your web page under 100 KB and load fast ? (the more is less the more is better)
use CDN (Content Delivery Network) to store HD images.
load HD images only on-demand, do not preload them.
use compressed, converted (avoid png) and resized images to fit the slider container.
do not scale images with CSS or inline CSS. (neither server side)
make use of the Lazy loading design pattern. (if as you say there are lots of images and the page is going to be very long)
Related
I have a website which contains some images in index.php
The problem I am facing is the whole page is not loading at once, I think images are taking some time to load
So what I have done is, I am showing an loading image at first and then after some time I am showing the page, that resolves the problem. But I am curious to know is there any other better way to do this?
I prefer to optimise the hell out of my images.
PNG images
You can use pngcrush to optimise your PNG files for you, but personally I find that once I'm done with it pngcrush only succeeds in making it bigger.
Use Indexed-PNG wherever possible. This will limit you to 256 colours, and most graphics editors won't allow partial transparency in Indexed-PNG (but it is possible - you just need the right editor. I use a custom PHP script with the GD image library) but you can expect to drop file size down to just a tiny fraction of what it was.
Reduce the amount of colours overall. PNG compression works best with blocks of the same colour, so reducing the number of colours improves compression.
GIF images
Especially for animations, there's a lot of things you can do.
Reduce the number of frames. Avoid duplicate frames at all costs, and just set the previous frame to have a longer display time.
Use combine rather than replace if possible. You will again have problems with transparent areas, but by using combine you can have each subsequent frame only change the stuff that... changes. This avoids the redundancy of re-writing the entire image if only a small part changes. GIMP has a useful filter "Animation > Optimize for GIF" which will do this for you.
Reduce colours as much as possible. GIF is limited to 256 colours, but if you can limit yourself to 32 or so, you'll get a much smaller file.
Using the above techniques, I once managed to shove 8MB of raw image data into a 125kb animated GIF.
JPG images
JPG is great for photos, but cameras have a tendency to write MASSIVE files.
Play around with the compression factor. Start at around 40%, and slowly bring it up until it looks acceptable. GIMP will show you a preview and the resulting filesize, so make use of that to find an acceptable compromise.
Scale the image down. You don't need 9 megapixels or however massive resolution cameras take now...
The above should help you reduce the amount of size taken by your images. Obviously, you should also cache images appropriately, so they only need to be retrieved once. Also make sure that you specify width and height on image elements so that the browser can reserve the space for them and avoid jumping around as they load...
And you should be pretty good.
It's hard to say what other options are available without knowing what the page looks like, but one option is to reserve space for the images so that the page text renders quickly in the correct position, and the images then load later.
Does anyone know why Javascript performance would be affected by the loading of lots of external JPG/PNG images into HTML5 Image() objects, totalling approx 200Mb-250Mb. Performance also seems to be affected by cache. Ie. if the cache is full(-ish) from previous browsing the performance on the current site is greatly reduced.
There are 2 says i can crudely solve it.
clear cache manually.
minimise browser, wait about 20 secs and re-open the browser after which time the iOS/browser has reclaimed the memory and runs the JS as it should.
I would have expected the iOS to reclaim required memory to run the current task, but it seems not. Another workaround is to load 200Mb of 'cache clearing' images into Image() objects, then remove these by setting the src = "". This does seem to help, but its not an elegant solution...
please help?
First and foremost read the excellent post on LinkedIn Engineering blog. Read it carefully and check if there are some optimizations that you can also try in your application. If you tried all of them and that still haven't solved your performance issues read on.
I assume that you have some image gallery or magazine-style content area on your page
How about having this image area in a separate iframe? What you could do then is this:
Have two iframes. Only one should be visible and active in time.
Load images into first iframe. Track the size of loaded images. If exact size tracking is hard
numberOfLoadedImages * averageImageSize
might be a pretty good aproximation.
As that number approaches some thresshold start preloading the currently visible content into second iframe.
Flip the visibility of iframes so the second one becomes active.
Clear the inner content of the first frame.
Repeat the whole procedure as necessary.
I don't know for sure if this would work for you but I hope that WebKit engine on iPad clears the memory of frames independently.
EDIT: It turned out you're writing a game.
If it's a game I assume that you want to have many game objects on the screen at the same time and you won't be able to simply unload some parts of them. Here are some suggestions for that case:
Don't use DOM for games: it's too memory-heavy. Fortunately, you're using canvas already.
Sprite your images. Image sprites not only help reducing the number of requests. They also let you reduce the number of Image objects and keep the per-file overhead lower. Read about using sprites for canvas animations on IE blog.
Optimize your images. There are several file size optimizers for images. SmushIt is one of them. Try it for your images. Pay attention to other techniques discussed in this great series by Stoyan Stefanov at YUI blog.
Try vector graphics. SVG is awesome and canvg can draw it on top of canvas.
Try simplifying your game world. Maybe some background objects don't need to be that detailed. Or maybe you can get away with fewer sprites for them. Or you can use image filters and masks for different objects of the same group. Like Dave Newton said iPad is a very constrained device and chances are you can get away with a relatively low-quality sprites.
These were all suggestions related to reduction of data you have to load. Some other suggestions that might work for you.
Preload images that you will need and unload images that you no longer need. If your game has "levels" or "missions" load sprites needed only for current one.
Try loading "popular" images first and download the remaining once in background. You can use separate <iframe> for that so your main game loop won't be interrupted by downloads. You can also use cross-frame messaging in order to coordinate your downloader frame.
You can store the very most popular images in localStorage, Application Cache and WebSQL. They can provide you with 5 mb of storage each. That's 15 megs of persistent cache for you. Note that you can use typed arrays for localStorage and WebSQL. Also keep in mind that Application Cache is quite hard to work with.
Try to package your game as a PhoneGap application. This way you can save your users from downloading a huge amount of data before playing the game. 200 megs as a single download just to open a page is way too much. Most people won't even bother to wait for that.
Other than that your initial suggestion to override cache with your images is actually valid. Just don't do it straight away. Explore the possibilities to reduce the download size for your game instead.
I managed to reduce the impact by setting all the images that aren't currently in the viewport to display:none. This was with background images though and I haven't tested over 100Mb of images, so can't say whether this truly helps. But definitely worth of trying.
I was wondering if there is any other ways to compress my images or any script that would load the page faster / or the the images behind the scenes?
The site is very interactive and using very high quality layers of images for the main layout. I have already saved for web devices in Photoshop and re-compressed using ImageOptim, some are jpeg but the majority are png24 to maintain transparancy, they are all set in CSS.
I have used jpegs and css sprites where i can but there is one in particular of a tree illustration streching the full site length, that is really slowing up the loading time, is there any I could compress these images further or code them differently that I missed?
Any help would be great thanks!
You said you are spriting. That is good.
You can also use tools such as PNGcrush which attempt to make files smaller by dropping things such as meta data.
You should also send far distant expiry headers and use a cache breaker on your images, to ensure the images won't be downloaded again if unnecessary.
In Photoshop, choose file-> save for web, you will be able to find the best compromise between size and quality.
Do you really need the transparency there? PNG transparency is unsupported on some browsers and makes the page processing intensive and slow even on high end computers, depending on image size and quantity of layers. If you can show something of your site maybe someone can give more hints about how to optimize it.
You can compress them on the fly with Apache if that's your web server. One of many available articles on the subject: http://www.samaxes.com/2009/01/more-on-compressing-and-caching-your-site-with-htaccess/
I need to dynamically load and put on screen huge number of images — it can be something like 1000–3000. Usually these pictures are of different size, and I'm getting their URLs from user. So, some of these pictures can be 1024x800 or 10x40 pixels.
I wrote a good JS script showing them nicely on one page (ala Google Images Search style), but they are still very heavy on RAM used (a hundred 500K images on one page is not good), so I thought about the option of really resizing images. Like making an image that’s 1000x800 pixels something like 100x80, and then forget (free the ram) of the original one.
Can this be done using JavaScript (without server side processing)?
I would suggest a different approach: Use pagination.
Display, say, 15 images. Then the user click on 'next page' and the next page is shown.
Or, even better, you can script that when the user reaches the end of the page the next page is automatically loaded.
If such thing is not what you want to do. Maybe you want to do a collage of images, then maybe you can check CSS3 transforms. I think they should be fast.
What you want to do is to take some pressure from the client so that it can handle all the images. Letting it resize all the images (JavaScript is client side) will do exactly the opposite because actually resizing an image is usually way more expensive than just displaying it (and not possible with browser JS anyway).
Usually there is always a better solution than displaying that many items at once. One would be dynamic loading e.g. when a user scrolls down the page (like the new Facebook profiles do) or using pagination. I can't imagine that all 1k - 3k images will be visible all at once.
There is no native JS way of doing this. You may be able to hack something using Flash but you really should resize the images on the server because:
You will save on bandwidth transferring those large 500K images to the client.
The client will be able to cache those images.
You'll get a faster loading page.
You'll be able to fit a lot more thumbnail images in memory and therefore will require less pagination.
more...
I'm (pretty) sure it can be done in browsers that support canvas. If this is a path you would like to take you should start here.
I see to possible problems with the canvas approach:
It will probably take a really long time (relatively speaking) to resize many images. Because of this, you're probably going to have to look into utilizing webworkers.
Will the browser actually free up any memory if you remove the image from the DOM and/or delete/null all references to those images? I don't know.
And some pretty pictures of a canvas-resized image:
this answer needs a ninja:--> Qk
I'm new to stack-overflow and programming so forgive me for any awkward phrasing!
I am building a side-scrolling website which is graphic-rich, and 680x9400px in size. I will be using some javascript and/or mootools to create a cool side-scrolling effect, similar to http://sursly.com.
I am web optimizing all the images used, but would like to know if anyone has any other ideas of how to speed up page loading? Is there any way to pre-load the site in horizontal sections for example?
Thanks in advance.
Using something like the jQuery Lazy Loading Plugin you can get a perceived speedup since only the visible images will be loaded. So they won't compete with off screen images.
I know you'll probably be using mootools, but it'd surprise me if they didn't have something similar.
Notice that most of the graphics on the Sursly site are pure black and white. This makes the site load dramatically faster since the files can be optimized way down.
I agree with Past One's answer, but would modify that slightly: instead of loading it as you need it, load it when you can. That is, initially load nothing but the first page. Once that has loaded, then load the second, then the third and so on.
Keep track of which parts have and have not loaded yet, and if a "page" which hasn't loaded is requested, then display a "please wait" sign and bump that page up the priority queue.
Remember to be careful with these techniques if you're interested in getting indexed by search engines.
Most websites that do this work like Google Maps does. They divide the world (or in your case, the virtual side-scrolling page) into tiles. As the user scrolls, AJAX is used to load the next tile, and it's displayed when the user reaches the edge of the currently visible tile.
You can load more than one not-yet-visible tiles on each side if you want, but it will take more client-side memory for that better user experience.