Site Optimization

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

I have been noticing lately that it seems like sometimes when I click on the flashcard sets, the server takes a long time to respond and sometimes gives a timeout error. I am currently hosting this site with the GoDaddy! economy hosting package which allows 250 GB of transfer bandwidth per month. Since I am only using about 5 GB per week, I thought everything should be working, so I called GoDaddy! technical support to ask what the problem could be.

Apparently the problem is with the flash wrapper (soundmanager2.swf) file that I am using to play the audio files. Since this file is fairly large and since it is accessed each time a flashcard set is selected, this file was getting too many simultaneous connections and slowing down the server. For now, my solution was to make multiple copies of this file. Every time a flashcard set is selected, it will now randomly access one of five copies of the flash wrapper. Hopefully, this will improve performance and reduce the time spent waiting for a set to load.

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