Update: Please take the poll on the home page of theSpoke and we will decide based on those results. Note that we are now looking at just removing from the home and what's going on pages, because those are the most visited on the site.Today's question of the day asks if you would give up being able to sign in on certain pages of theSpoke (
home,
what's going on?,
hubs, and
message board) in order to improve the speed of the site overall.
Here's a little more information on why we're asking.
theSpoke has been growing pretty quickly over the last few months, especially with the Imagine Cup being hosted here. As our membership continues to grow, we want to make sure the site operates as efficiently as possible. Recently we've been testing some site improvements for theSpoke in a development environment and have found that we can make a significant improvement by caching certain pages on the server side, as opposed to the client side. By caching the pages above, we'd remove the sign in, username, and avatar box you always see in the upper right hand corner of the screen (only from these pages). However, the speed of these pages would increase quite a bit. To give you an idea, on our test server, the number of requests per second that theSpoke can handle on these pages went up by almost two orders of magnitude when caching was implemented. The downside, of course, is that you'd have to sign in on a page other than the home, what's going on?, hubs, or message board pages, and your username and avatar would not appear in the upper right hand corner of these pages.
As you can tell, we're trying to balance a consistent user experience with a faster site. What do you think? Please let me know your thoughts by posting below or answering the question of the day.
Finally, these potential improvements are courtesy of
Russ, a new member of our team (and a technical guru) who is helping out with theSpoke and the Imagine Cup. Thanks Russ!