Myspace lag

If you have used myspace as either a reader or author you have probably noticed that it feels slow on even the fastest of computers. The Forbes article below talks about one of the reasons being DNS lookups. Because there are so many elements on the typical myspace page, drawn from a wide variety of sources, not just myspace.com, your web browser can easily have to run 20 to 30 dns lookups on each and every page, plus download individual page elements from each of those servers.

When creating your myspace pages, you can help your users experience faster load times by hosting any extra elements on your own webserver, rather than direct linking to multiple sources. I do this with my myspace profile, and it works fairly well. Just be advised that you should take precautions to keep others from direct linking to your content, since you could find your own webserver overloaded quite easily if you host content that would fit well on other pages. See this primer on how to protect your content using apache for some tips. Also some webhosts offer hotlink protection via the Cpanel webhost control panel, this is mentioned in the primer mentioned above.

When browsing the pages of others using Mozilla Firefox the simple step of preventing flash from loading automatically can significantly boost your viewing speed. The boxes surrounding flash content are replaced with a one click button that will only activate flash elements when you want them to run. You will be surprised how much of the slowdown when viewing busy pages is caused by massive flash elements being displayed on the page. Use the extension FlashBlock to accomplish this.

To avoid those irritating flashing banners on the top of every myspace page, add the AdBlock Plus extension.

Here is the article that sparked my interest in myspace viewing speeds:
Forbes Article on MySpace Lag