www.ashcity.com

I am interested in sourcing out someone that would evaluate our website and make recommendations on how we can greatly improve the performance and reduce pageload time.

We are in the process of optimizing all graphical content and have implemented a process to ensure that all new graphical content is optimized prior to promotion into the live environment.

The biggest factor of the lack of performance I feel is due to too much overhead within the JSP and the way each data transaction and page request is being processed from the source to the application and web servers.

We are using an AS400 w/DB2 with Websphere.

We need our site to Rock not crawl.

Any help or referrals would be greatly appreciated. Sadly if you are on a dial-up connection you cannot successfully keep an active session open as time outs are often experienced between requests.

This is a major problem for us as 36% of our customer base is still on dial up.

very very nice looking site. however your images need to be of smaller file size in order to load faster. the page itself seems to be executing very quickly, but the images take a while to load. photoshop is the best for optimizing images without loosing quality.

__________________
http://www.pahardcore.com

Out of curiousity, what kind of format is your pics? Maybe if they are too big in size they can be converted to another kind of format to make it easier and faster to load.

__________________
Pages for Children sends books and cards to sick children while in the hospital.
Prints by Olivia

Most of the images are .jpg and gifs. But as I stated we are in the process of optimising the images already. We will have completed this task within the next week.

Using Fireworks and image ready we have been able to reduce gif file sizes as much as 85% and the jpg's as much as 60% without any visible reduction in image quality.

In respect I feel that we are on the right path with our Image optimization project but still need some insight on the JSP code.

ways to speed up and server side language:

use comparisons that boil down to boolean comparisons instead of regular comparisons. for example:

if this = that: bad
if comparefunction(this, that): good

also, if you're using ms sql, use stored procedures. sprocs are compiled and thus much faster to execture than raw sql statements.

another thing for using sql is to make sure you use indexes on all fields you will be comparing a lot or sorting by more than other fields. indexing speeds up select queries greatly

__________________
http://www.pahardcore.com