What has everyone done to help with load times? I took the health club demo which I calculated out to be around 350kb in size, put it up on one of our web servers, and hit it from a few different locations. If you calc out the speed of a T1, which most of my commercial customers are, at around 1500kbps (divide by 8 to get kbytes per second of 187k) and you will see load times of 1.87 seconds. I am seeing IE6 and IE7 initial load times of almost 10 seconds, with subsequent load times of about 3-4 seconds. Firefox 3.5 I am seeing load times of about 2.5 seconds initially, 1.5-2 seconds subsequently.
What have people done to speed up these load times? The server is apache2, compresses (gzip) output, and runs a caching engine. It sits in a datacenter with 100mb bandwidth, and its resources are running around 2% utilization.
I guess the biggest issue is how slowly IE renders the page, but 99% of my customers use IE. Any config to IE, or any other ideas that could help speed up load times?
