Re: [wsrp] [wsrp-wsia] [change request #249] Class name length impact onperformance

To keep this reasonably in perspective,
files with CSS definitions make wonderful items for caching and so the
download time impact is lessened significantly. Also, the length of the
class names is a minor part of the length of the CSS file.

The class names in the content is unlikely
to add over a k in overall file size and therefore be a minor portion of
the performance question.

Net: Class names should be as short
as is reasonable as they do impact End-User performance, but clarity of
what the class is for should not be sacrificed in order to shorten the
name.

Rich Thompson

Rich Thompson/Watson/IBM@IBMUS

03/26/2003 10:09 AM
        

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       [wsrp] [wsrp-wsia] [change request #249]
Class name length impact on performance

This came from an internal review by our "performance police":

Document: Spec 0.92 

Section: 10.5 CSS Style defintions 

Page/Line: 72/15 

Requested by: Michael Freedman 

Old Text: 

portlet-*

New Text:  

shorter class names

Reasoning: 

Please strongly consider using *much* shorter names for these CSS elements.
 We already have network latency/transmission issues due to the size
of our existing CSS files because they cannot utilize browser compression.

  

Long names in the CSS definitions lead to large CSS files and noticably
slower download times.  Additionally the "source" HTML pages
that refer to the CSS's will be noticably larger as a result of these long
names.

To give a concrete example, consider a centralized Portal server configuration,
ie HQ/MOC, with a remote client in Singapore, operating over a fairly standard
200ms latency network.  Transmitting a 10k CSS file will cause ~6
round trips due to network startup costs. 

  

Overall loss due to network Round trips = 220 * 6 or ~1.3s