KITCHEN 4.1 we cook art here!

by **Drakkheim** » 27 Jun 2011, 21:37

Hey, longtime lurker here...

My biggest qualm with the site is that it's SOO SLOW to browse.
Even with everything cached it still takes 6-9 seconds to load a page on a T1.
And if you don't pop by regularly then you've got to reload the entire page and that can take up to 30 seconds or so. and frankly I've done 5 other things in other tabs before this page has even loaded.
Heck, just the footer background image is almost half a meg.. also the performance hit on the non scrolling body background under the translucent body column is rough on older browsers. And do people really use the buttons on the left side?

Oh and it just crashed IE9 into compatibility mode and there's some ie8 styling that isn't working in fallback mode.

On the other hand the smilies are great! And it sounds like the new landing page where you can showcase stuff like the RPG (??!?) would be really cool. It's pretty overwhelming when you don't know what anything is.

Anyway that's my two cents.

i has beer! · by **Spiderspy** » 01 Jul 2011, 12:08

I suppose it could cool and ok for people like Drakkheim to have another skin for the forum with no details to minimize the delay

Administrator · by **Randis ::** » 02 Jul 2011, 20:59

The graphics for this page are small, the only difference to other pages is that we use some wrapped textures for backgrounds and transparency effects but that has nothing much to do with the speed it loads.
The server hosting our page is located in the US and i am located in thailand and still i get a fairly quick response so i can not explain the 6-9 seconds delay for a single page.
We do however have almost 2 gigabytes of uploaded images.
This is not some super cheap private hosting space, but it is also not some 500 $ a month VPS server like most larger communities have. The Kitchen has no income, we are purely nonprofit and i am paying the fun from my own pocket.
Lots of the art sites are hosted on multiple servers, we can not have that.
I am really sorry and i wish i could make it faster but that's how it is for now.
I will explore a possibility of a second skin when i have time

i drink and post · by **Meteorskies** » 03 Jul 2011, 11:38

For regular members information, you will notice that the staff launched several activities, changes some things in the board organization, and nothing really changed in terms of activity...

i like your GF! · by **TomDeVis** » 05 Jul 2011, 07:46

not sure if this is the right place, but I really like the featured sketchbooks, but it might be cool to see the members name when you hover over instead of " SKETCHBOOK "

i drink and post · by **Mugshotpro** » 05 Jul 2011, 12:27

TomDeVis wrote:not sure if this is the right place, but I really like the featured sketchbooks, but it might be cool to see the members name when you hover over instead of " SKETCHBOOK "

I agree

Administrator · by **Randis ::** » 05 Jul 2011, 16:41

sure, i can add that :b3:

dizzy · by **lolbbq** » 09 Jul 2011, 02:53

the king has spoken

love beer · by **Ragman** » 09 Jul 2011, 21:17

Here's an idea for another activity;

Someone (anyone) could make a post with a detailed description of something (It can be a place, person, animal, vehicle, whatever), and other forum-goers can then attempt paint what the poster described. Kind of like the RPG project (Is that still up, by the way?) but on a much smaller scale