Sorry, JC—Jive lied!

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

I'm referencing the Widgets Query in the FAQs of this forum:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/1963810?tstart=0#1963810

Do widgets like "more like this" and "popular discussions" and "top participants" exact any perform...

                                                                                                                       

Reply from Jive Software:

No. In fact these do the exact opposite. If anything, they would be improving performance in the system. These widgets do everything asynchronously so they will simply fire off a request for this data, the system will crunch the numbers then return the result to the page to be displayed. This is all done in real time so even though the widget may still be loading the rest of the page should be displayed and working correctly.

This is categorically NOT true.

The fact is that the longest delay in the forums is when waiting for those results, always at least several seconds, during which the whole browser is unusable as the satus bar reads "waiting for stats.adobe.com" and/or "transferring data from stats.adobe.com".  Sometimes the wait can be so long as to trigger a connection timeout, on other occasions it just hangs there indefinitely until I force quit the browser (indistinctly Firefox, Safari, iCab, etc.).  The page is viewable but not scrollable during the delay.

That response from Jive can only stem from outright bad faith or boundless incompetence and ignorance.  

(Insert Gandhi quote here for the edification of Jive staff.)

[Guest]

I said the same but with less words!  

http://forums.adobe.com/message/1968237#1968237

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

Ramón G Castañeda wrote:

(Insert Gandhi quote here for the edification of Jive staff.)

This is a genuine, well-known quote by Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian spiritual leader and activist:

• A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

• He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it.

• He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.

• We are not doing him a favor by serving him.     He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Employees of any entity, whether in government or in private business, will do well to keep it in mind and at heart.

The recent post by Kathy Nguyen, universally well received here, shows that she knows this principle and puts it into practice.  So does John Cornicello, of course.

However, a few Adobe staff and associates seem somehow to think that Adobe's customers are lowly adversaries in some sort of Internet game or in a newsgroup.  Those who manifest that misguided and poisonous attitude in this forum and in their blogs are showing their incompetence and their ignorance of basic business principles.  To them I say:  you're dead wrong!  You are far from being our superiors, you are our servants.

They should know well who they are—and we certainly do.

Jive Software staff needs to heed this admonition too.  Adobe is a Jive Customer.

[Chris Cox]

OK, that's interesting.

I don't think stats.adobe.com is part of the forums.  I think it's a stats gathering database for adobe.com in general.

Hmm, do you know of any good utilities that will count URLs to sites used in loading a page and the time taken for each URL?  That might help isolate some of the slowdowns.

[Mark_A__Boyd]

For general information, in Safari, you can turn on Preferences->Show Develop menu in menu bar

Then, use Develop->Network Timeline to get a general idea. That little colored bar at the bottom can be toggled between "Transfer Time" and "Transfer Size"

In this particular case, stats.adobe.com comes under the grey "Other" in my screen grab. It doesn't take that long by itself, but it gets triggered near the end.

For detailed info, you can use a packet sniffer such as WireShark (formerly Ethereal) www.wireshark.org

[Chris Cox]

Oooh, I didn't know about that in Safari (been a while since I had to debug anything serious on the web).  Thanks!

Octagate also looks quite useful.

http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/?Target=AJAX

[Kath-H]

This is the part of Jive's reply that just 'feels' unlikely:

Do widgets like "more like this" and "popular discussions" and "top participants" exact any performance hit when they are being figured out and displayed?

Reply from Jive Software:

No. In fact these do the exact opposite. If anything, they would be improving performance in the system.

I just don't see how that could be.

[Kath-H]

Pants on fire

[Chris Cox]

If they coded the page to display before the "MoreLikeThis" script has completed, they might still be right. (like displaying a page before all images have loaded by using the image size tags)

And that script seems to take a highly variable time to execute/load depending on which topic you're looking at.

[Kath-H]

Couple of drop-shadow .pngs, a cart and a silver swimmer - 136KB, none of it down to Jive.

[Kath-H]

If they coded the page to display before the "MoreLikeThis" script has completed, they might still be right

No, it might be correct that 'More like this' doesn't slow things down - I still dispute the idea that it could actually be speeding things up.

Some interesting comments in the css about stuff not displaying properly.

[Kath-H]

We often seem to be waiting for something starting wwwimages.adobe,com (missing dot after www is correct) - that file is in fact a javascript.

[Kath-H]

Hmph. 'Popular Discussion' and 'Top Participants' don't show up in the Safari console at all, unlike 'More Like this'.

[Kath-H]

Trying to validate the css throws up 342 errors.

[Mark_A__Boyd]

OctaGate does look interesting. However, it seems to download all the feeds, too. AFAIK, that doesn't happen to me (never subscribed to any feeds) just by browsing the site. It also took 18 seconds for my one test while my safari test (at the same time) took less than 2 seconds. Of course, Safari had chached some of the content. Hmm. I seem to have to wait for wwwimages.adobe.com even when there are apparently no new graphics to download - not in my cache?

Will check my caches some other day. I'm a bit busy today.

Thanks for the OctaGate link!

[Kath-H]

Oooh indeed, I didn't know about that either. Console showing 30 errors, all unmatched <a> tags.

[Zeno_Bokor]

came across this one while googling and it also shows the file sizes. Just look at the amount of images it has to load

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

[Chris Cox]

Ok, the safari network inspector is more useful than I expected.

For instance, it tells me that some images have a maximum cache time of 15 minutes or less.

windowfrost.png

footer-dropshadow.png

body-dropshadow.png

logo_google.gif

truste_seal_eu.gif

contentFooter_dropshadow.png (2 copies, one long lived, one not)

Most of the content has a max-age between 6 hours and 2 weeks - that's good.

[Chris Cox]

windowfrost.png - is an RGB PNG image, with content that is pure grayscale (same values on all 3 channels).

Currently 55k, shrinks to 28k if converted to grayscale (without dithering!) and resaved.

[Chris Cox]

There are occasional delays loading screen-optimized.css - sometimes it loads in a fraction of a second, and sometimes it doesn't even start loading until 4 to 8 seconds in.  This could be due to delays loading the primary page description - I just had a forum reload take 12 seconds just to get the basic HTML to load. (normally takes 4 or less)

There are also odd gaps in the image file loading.

And I just love that clicking "mark all as read" forces all the avatar icons to reload. (bug)

[Kath-H]

Could lose some weight ditching the silver swimmer - since we can't see it anyway.

[adobe-admin]

All of those pieces with the short cache times are coming from adobe.com, not from Jive. We're working with the web team to get those set like the rest of the content.

[Guest]

Seems to be symptomatic of the whole Adobe site.

(I have mentioned this when they pester me with the questionnaire.)

[Chris Cox]

Re: stats and short caches -- thought so.

[Phos_four_dots]

Chris Cox wrote:

Oooh, I didn't know about that in Safari (been a while since I had to debug anything serious on the web).  Thanks!

Octagate also looks quite useful.

http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/?Target=AJAX

I didn't know Safari had that either (since I rarely use it). Nice geeky feature.

I've been nosing around with the Firebug add-on for Firefox. It does loads of good stuff:

http://getfirebug.com/net.html