Shoutbox Updates
Posted: July 3rd, 2008, 12:57 pm
I have made some modifications to the code responsible for the shoutbox functionality. These updates do not add any new features or functions, but are instead targeted at making the shoutbox more efficient and less bandwidth hungry.
Last month the shoutbox accounted for 12.7% of the total bandwidth usage for the entire tsugaming website, due to the fact it updated it's contents every 2 seconds. The new updates change the update frequency to every 10 seconds, and instead of downloading a complete copy of the shoutbox content every time, it instead does a check to see if any new data is available, and if not, then it does not download the whole thing again.
The changes should also make the shoutbox more responsive when browsing between pages, and when editing or deleting shouts. One additional change, which is purely cosmetic, is the use of a greyscale version of the forward and backward buttons when you at at the first or last pages.
One additional point worth making, is that the javascript functions for the website are now stored in seperate .js files, which means they are no longer downloaded as part of the page content for each page you view, and are instead downloaded just once and then stored in your browsers cache. This should also help to improve bandwidth usage.
Last month the shoutbox accounted for 12.7% of the total bandwidth usage for the entire tsugaming website, due to the fact it updated it's contents every 2 seconds. The new updates change the update frequency to every 10 seconds, and instead of downloading a complete copy of the shoutbox content every time, it instead does a check to see if any new data is available, and if not, then it does not download the whole thing again.
The changes should also make the shoutbox more responsive when browsing between pages, and when editing or deleting shouts. One additional change, which is purely cosmetic, is the use of a greyscale version of the forward and backward buttons when you at at the first or last pages.
One additional point worth making, is that the javascript functions for the website are now stored in seperate .js files, which means they are no longer downloaded as part of the page content for each page you view, and are instead downloaded just once and then stored in your browsers cache. This should also help to improve bandwidth usage.