68kmla loads faster than Google

[luddite]

I've noticed this lately... at home on my crappy 56k dial-up, the 68kmla (I have "view new posts" bookmarked) consistently loads faster than Google's home page. Just thought it odd given that Google has about two dozen words and one small graphic... makes you wonder what they're up to behind the scenes.

The flip side of this is that the admins deserve credit for running a forum that's tolerable on dial-up -- there's more than a few that I just don't bother with anymore because they're too slow.

[LCGuy]

Depending on how often you visit the forums, its likely cached a lot more than Google is. I noticed the exact same thing myself when I was on dialup, the 68kMLA loaded faster than just about anything else, because my computer had cached most of it, so there wasn't much to load over the connection.

[macgeek417]

It takes 2 seconds to load the reply page. (Actually 1.986)

[Anonymous Freak]

Right now, for me, using Safari 4 in OS X...

http://www.google.com loads six files. One is a 9.6 KB main HTML, then there are the 8.4 KB and 5.3 KB images, and finally a 51.9 KB JavaScript file. That's probably the holdup, you're waiting for that JavaScript to load every time.

68kmla.org/forums/search.php?search_id=newposts returns 23 files. One is a 34.1 KB HTML, then a 9.7 KB stylesheet, and a bunch of images, one 6.0 KB (the main logo,) one 2.1 KB (the PayPal donate,) and a bunch of less-than-1.0 KB mini images.

So the raw text data, before pictures, is 61.5 KB for Google, and 43.8 KB for 68kmla. Not a surprising result then. Even adding up all the small 68kmla pictures, the whole page is still smaller than Google.

I bet if you disable Javascript, Google will be lightning fast. (But then you get an uglier version of google.com.)

edit: Yup, turning off Javascript, and all Google loads is its 9.5 KB HTML, and 8.4 KB GIF. The 68kmla new posts page still returns its 34.1 KB HTML and 9.7 KB CSS, plus pictures.

[Dog Cow]

Depending on how often you visit the forums, its likely cached a lot more than Google is.

phpBB pages don't cache.

[LCGuy]

I just assumed they did - as I said, when I was on dialup, the 68kMLA loaded faster than most other sites, and I assumed it was because it was cached better than most other sites, because of how frequently I visit. Regardless of whether the pages are cached or not, I'm assuming the images would be, even though they're only tiny GIFs, loading them over a dialup connection every time would still really slow things down.