Major overhead with milonic menus

dahamsta

I use an MSIE-based tabbed browser (Avant), which has had problems with CPU overruns and crashes for some time, however I noticed a while back that these crashes only occurred for me when Boards was loaded in one of the tabs.

As an experiment I set my proxy server to block boards.ie/javascript and not only did the problems disappear, pages on the site started loading instantly, whereas before they took a second or two to start rendering; something I had been been attributing to server load.

The weight of the javascripts is quite substantial at this stage, nearly 60KB for the menus alone, however these are cached by the browser so the problem isn't related to load time. With this in mind, I'm thinking that that the javascript interpreter is being overloaded by the menu code, causing the holdup.

I've tested this on the plain-jane MSIE too, and the same problem appears. My machine is a 1GHz AMD Thunderbird with 768MB SDRAM, which is no Ferrari, but I imagine there are quite a few people out there running the same or less.

Running Boards without the menus is slightly cumbersome but a whole lot more pleasing because of instant page loads. Obviously I'm not suggesting that the menus be removed based on my word, but might I suggest a short-term test to see whether performance is improved for others without the menus?

If it is, unfortunately no alternative with the same functionality is available, however one suggestion would be to remove the deep hierarchy and just list the main categories of forums. Foot.ie, for example, has a relatively limited hierarchy of menus, and is hardly affected by this problem.

That being said, we could be running different versions of the menu code.

adam

yellum

Youch. Must look into that myself and see does it make a difference.

Would CSS menus make much difference ?

http://www.theimposter.org/examples/onhovermenu/

DeVore

we've been aware of a render-pause with the javascript for a while now but never thought it that bothersome to be honest. I'll let Cloud or Ecksor speak to the option of using CSS drop downs, I'd hate to lose the drop downs though, they make navigation much much easier...

DeV.

dahamsta

Originally posted by DeVore
we've been aware of a render-pause with the javascript for a while now but never thought it that bothersome to be honest. I'll let Cloud or Ecksor speak to the option of using CSS drop downs, I'd hate to lose the drop downs though, they make navigation much much easier...

Damn straight. The fast response far outweighs the menus for me though so I'm happy enough blocking the scripts on my proxy. I just said I'd suggest running a test to see if others notice a big difference.

adam

Stark

I'm having the same problems as Adam. It's a hell of a lot worse under Linux as well (it's impossible to browse boards without javascript turned off). I find under Windows that Mozilla Firebird is better able to cope than IE.

I think Damien's suggestion of the CSS menus would be a lot better as these seem to have little overhead for me.

spongebob

MSIE 5.1 for the Mac has the same issue until you turn off scripting and then it loads fine.

M