Web Biz

Jax commented on my last post regarding the load time of my new homepage.  I definitely noticed the load time increase dramatically after implementing ColdFusion 8’s <cfwindow>, <cfdiv>, and <cfform> tags instead of just using Prototype/scriptaculous with a custom JS/CSS file.  Here is a quick summary of what I found.

I agree, it can definitely be very slow to load.  The unfortunate part of using CF8 <cfdiv> and <cfwindow> I suppose.  I have minimized all of my CSS and JS, and I am using mod_deflate on Apache 2.x - so, there’s not much more to be done there.

As a quick test, I commented out the <cfwindow>, <cfdiv>, and <cfform> tags to compare the difference of using just Prototype and scriptaculous with my own JS.  Here is what I found:

Using the CF8 tags mentioned above:
  Scripts: 138 KB (469 KB uncompressed)
  CSS: 15 KB (83 KB uncompressed)
  Images: 1179 KB

Without the CF8 tags mentioned above:
  Scripts: 51 KB (174 KB uncompressed)
  CSS: 4 KB (18 KB uncompressed)
  Images: 179 KB

As you can see, there is a huge difference between the two.  As a quick side note, I got these numbers using the web developer toolbar in Firefox - Information > Document size outputs this information.  I guess this is the price we pay for using RIA technology without rolling your own implementation.