Long ago looked at and deceided it was not for me. To many reasons to list.
But noticed your site.
http://www.gdsweb.ca/ loads very slowly 77.84 seconds (ISDN 128K) when my cache is cleared and slowly 32.5 seconds thereafter when cached.
Global Statistics
Total HTTP Requests: 29 <---- (too many requests)
Total Size: 1180272 bytes
Object Size Totals
Object type Size (bytes) Download @ 56K (seconds) Download @ T1 (seconds)
HTML: 8282 1.85 0.24
HTML Images: 362395 74.22 3.92
CSS Images: 799405 161.92 6.84
Total Images: 1161800 236.14 10.76
javascript
: 3876 1.17 0.42
CSS: 6314 1.86 0.63
Multimedia: 0 0.00 0.00
Other: 0 0.00 0.00
External Objects
External Object QTY
Total HTML: 1
Total HTML Images: 10
Total CSS Images: 13
Total Images: 23
Total Scripts: 2
Total CSS imports: 3
Total Frames: 0
Total Iframes: 0
Your site is using HTTP compression, otherwise called content encoding using gzip. Most people do not use compression. Don't known if it is in the framework or you put it in.
*** Some futher areas you can improve the download speed.***
Noticed in your code:
The total number of objects on this page is 29 which by their number will dominate web page delay.
Above 20 objects per page the overhead from dealing with the actual objects accounts for more than 80% of whole page latency.
Minimize HTTP requests - 3 css files into one.
Often developers create separate style sheets and scripts for organizational purposes, and import them into their pages as needed. There are two problems with this approach:
1. it requires additional HTTP requests, and
2. you can encounter the same-domain connection limit
By combining external files and optionally including CSS and JavaScript directly within your XHTML pages, you can minimize the number of HTTP requests required to render your page. Each unique HTTP request requires a round trip to a server, introducing indeterminate delays. Users attune to fast, consistent response times. The more HTTP requests that your pages require, the slower and less consistent their response time will be.
This technique is especially important in the head of your XHTML documents. With few exceptions, browsers must load and parse external CSS and JavaScript files referenced within the head of your XHTML before they parse the body content. By minimizing the HTTP request load you can maximize the initial display speed of your content.
Combined all css files into one. You might want to try it out. combined.css (zipped file)
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Another method:
Scripts that load in the head of your HTML document actually block the loading and parsing of other objects, until they are downloaded.
You need to tell the server two things: first, to parse CSS files for PHP commands and second, to send the correct MIME type:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .css
header('Content-type: text/css');Next you can merge your CSS files together with PHP inside the CSS file like this:
<?php
include("layout.css");
include("navigation.css");
include("advanced.css");
?>
To deliver files based on browser environment variables (for example, to simulate an @import to filter out older browsers), you could use software like phpsniff available at Sourceforge phpsniff.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpsniff/
As specified above, the dynamic CSS file will not cache properly. If you add the following headers to the top of your PHP file after the content type, they will cache for three hours (adjust 10,800 seconds as necessary).
header('Cache-control: must-revalidate');
header('Expires: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time() + 10800) . ' GMT');
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Finally you could look into css sprites - a bit harder then above methods. (google, yahoo and others use this method)
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Javascript in the body:
Should be placed just before the close </body>. See if you can move <!-- start feedwind code --> down there and test the page, to see if it still functions properly.
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Images:
The total size of your images is 1161800 bytes. Maybe try to optimize them more for size, re-upload and let gzip do it's thing.
Just some thoughts - ideas for you to look at.
Hope you don't mind.