NYCPHP Meetup

[Matt Morgan]

[attempted to rearrange top posting for clarity--my apologies if I 
mucked up the ">" signs]

 > harvey wrote:
 > > At 12:15 PM 3/8/2005, Faber Fedor wrote:
 > > > On 08/03/05 12:06 -0500, harvey wrote:
 > > > Hello NYPHP,
 > > >
 > > > I've got a page that works totally fine for me. Takes a few 
seconds to load
 > > > on cable connection with IE 6 PC. Works fine for a colleague with 
DSL on
 > > > the Mac (not sure which browser). But for the most important person
 > > > (client!) the page is taking over a minute and a half to load. 
He's on Win
 > > > XP and IE (probably 6) with cable connection.

 > > Why are you looking at code changes when the problem is obviously with
 > > the client's computer/connection?
 > > You should find out what the problem is before you start fixing it.

 > Same thing happened to the client's assistant in a different location 
on a different system.
 > Maybe both their connections are slow. Can't change that. But I can 
change the code if that will help.

This is not a slow connection problem unless every page on your site 
loads slow for them. You could test by making a very simple, text/plain 
page with as much content as your bands/shows page and seeing if they 
download it faster. But I think I know what's going to happen (it will 
load fast). If it does load slowly, they have bigger problems.

Nor do I think it's a problem with your code, unless you are generating 
bad HTML (have you validated it?). The browser doesn't see the php, only 
the HTML. And if it goes fast for you, the php part is fast. I suspect a 
table-rendering issue with their browsers, or maybe they have some funny 
filtering setup that scans big pages slowly, or whatever (they, 
hopefully, should be able to tell you what the "whatever" might be). Or 
maybe (like most Windows computers out there) they're crammed with 
viruses and spyware and ... In any case, most likely it's on their end 
and changing your code won't fix it, unless you can remove all HTML 
tables from the generated page and/or you're sending bad HTML.

First, test the connection by having them download a large, but simple 
page. Second, validate the HTML your code generates. If it validates 
your code is good, or good enough. Third, Firefox is free. Ask them to 
install it and try your (validated) pages with Firefox. Or, if they 
don't want to install Firefox, have them update IE to exactly the 
version you're using, or something newer (check to verify what they're 
actually using--you're not sure, right?).

Note: I am more of an admin than a programmer. If that was my network, I 
would assume something was wrong on my end and take responsibility for 
it. I sincerely believe that your responsibility here is to generate 
valid HTML (unless they specified otherwise :-)), and anything else is 
their problem. Maybe that's difficult in some way, but you shouldn't be 
afraid to say it. If there's something wrong over there, they should 
know about it.

Good luck,
Matt