smartclient 6.0 speed on IE 7

[mithun]

Hi,

I am using smartclient 6 and IE 6 for my application.
I have some screens with smartclient listgrid.

What i have observed is my listgrid loading time, rows refresh time etc. are very slow on IE 7 whereas same page and actions works very fast on IE 6.0.

My page takes some 10 secs of time on first time to fetch some data for listgrid. But further page loads are very fast. But when it goes to IE 7 no matter how many times i visit a page it takes same time.

It is not just caching issue. On row clicks i refresh some cells to show / hide images. This action takes so long time on IE 7 that user can see images disappearing and appearing after few seconds on refreshcell call.

If it is related to code optimization then thing to be noticed is same page responds fast on IE 6.

Is it known issue ? i have to check some particular setup on browser?

[Isomorphic]

Hi mithun,

It's a caching issue, and in fact, almost certainly only a caching issue. That "slow row refresh" effect will happen if you have not correctly set caching settings for the images your application accesses. IE7 is faster than IE6 at basically everything, in some cases, much faster.

[mithun]

Thanks.

right, caching of images is one thing.

I also observed that page refresh or revisiting the same page both takes longer time on IE 7. I get blank page for 20 seconds and later i get list grid with no data and then my load grid data function gets called as part of onload script and list grid gets loaded.

Getting empty list grid and then data takes hardly 2-3 seconds but initial blank page time is longer.

But when it goes to IE 6 i only get first visit time delay and later page reloads are very fast.

So is this page reloading slowness related to some sort of browser setting ?
If it is related to caching of smartclient javascript and smartclient's client side utilities then can you provide details that how it can be done ?

[Isomorphic]

The only thing that could really explain this is caching being completed disabled on IE7 in combination with an extremely slow server connection that takes 20 seconds just to load the SmartClient runtime.

You can use fiddler (fiddlertool.com) to verify that IE7 is fetching both the SmartClient runtime (ISC_Core.js et al) and various images every time. Then:

1) If you have changed IE's caching settings from the default, restore the defaults.

2) If you have installed any extensions in IE7, try disabling those.

3) If you are using one of several tricks to run IE6 and IE7 in parallel on the same machine, try IE7 in a normal installation

4) See if you can get this to happen on any other machine.

[mithun]

i verified with firebug the cause of page loading time.
Isc javascript files are around 1 MB in total size. My applications normal js and other web files are not more than 10 kb each.
My web server has been setup to compres files of type: text/*.

But when we use load isomorphic tag to create js include statements it doesnt add type="text/javascript" tag. So because of this these files were not compressed when they are transferred from server to browser cache.

I will analyze and let you know increase in performance with static script include tags like this:

<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">window.isomorphicDir='/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Core.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>isc._lastModule='Core';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Foundation.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>isc._lastModule='Foundation';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Containers.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>isc._lastModule='Containers';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Grids.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>isc._lastModule='Grids';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_Forms.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>isc._lastModule='Forms';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/system/modules/ISC_DataBinding.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>isc._lastModule='DataBinding';</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" SRC=/uitoolkit/web20/isomorphic/skins/standard/load_skin.js?isc_version=6.0.js></SCRIPT>

[Isomorphic]

Adding type="text/javascript" to the <SCRIPT> tag won't help, webservers determine the file's mime type by the file extension. If you are using Apache, the actual issue is probably that the Apache defaults treat a .js file as mime type application/x-javascript.

However, it is not actually safe to serve compressed JavaScript to older versions of IE6 without additional workarounds. This why is SmartClient includes the CompressionFilter, which transparently works around these problems.

Beyond that this doesn't explain your IE6 vs IE7 differences..

If you want everything to just work, install the SmartClient Java Server in the default configuration. You may, at that point, want to place an Apache webserver in front of the SmartClient Java Server in order to serve image requests only - but to do this correctly be sure you have a good working knowledge of HTTP Expires headers.

[mithun]

thanks.
We added compression filter for application/x-javascript type.
This compresses isomorphic js files.

loading time is significantly improved now and it is around 5-6 seconds on first time.

[almond]

hi, i facing problem on login. When user open a new broswer and login to my web application, broswer have to take a long time (about 1.5 mins) to load into a main page.
After success login, user logout and login for the second time, the same broswer will take a short time (about few second) load into main page.

I have try to clear all cache from the broswer and login again, as expected broswer will take long time to load into main page.

Question:
1. How to tuning/enhance the login speed?

I use smartgwt(isc_version=7.0beta), mysql, java and spring to build this web application.

Thanks.