Is it just me, or are the online web pages at MSDN2 extremely “bulky?” I really like the MSDN2 design, from the friendly URLs to the slicker tree view, but garsh darnit if it isn't slower than molasses. There's typically a several-second pause from clicking on a link in a help doc or from the tree view, and having the page loaded, and my little network traffic monitor in the Google Desktop Sidebar shows network traffic peaking at 160 KB/s for several seconds. I decided to break out Fiddler to see just what the heck was slowing everything down. I picked an arbitrary MSDN2 page - BoundField Class - and here are the results:
- 35 Files were downloaded from Microsoft's site during the request, from the core ASP.NET page to CSS files, JavaScript files, images, and files from WebResource.axd that were, I assume, JavaScript files (seeing as they were of MIME type application/x-javascript). The total bytes downloaded for all 35 files was 1,171,064!!
- The main culprit, by far, was the ASP.NET page, which was a whopping 1,081,612 bytes in size! Eep. Inspecting the rendered HTML, nearly 144 KB of that - about 13% - was view state. Aside from that, the majority of the bulk seemed due to JavaScript calls that tied together the main page content and the tree view on the left.
- Sadly there was no compression on any dynamic resources. While this would add overhead on the server-side, it might be benefitial considering the rendered page sizes. Furthermore, the scripts emitted by WebResource.axd and the main page don't use caching. Which means I'm sucking down all 1+ million bytes the next time I hit this page. (The images, JavaScript files, and CSS files are cached.)
Do others experience this sort of lag on MSDN2? Alternatively, hitting up MSDN1 for the BoundColumn class help page (comparable to BoundField), 42 total files are downloaded, but the main ASP.NET page is about 1/90th the weight of the BoundField page, coming in at 13,569 bytes and the total size is 129,354 bytes (which is less than the view state size of the MSDN2 content!). Most of that total size is due to the tree view's XML content. However, since it's in a separate frame, the main page can load without having to wait for the other... much snappier than the MSDN2 counterpart.
Granted, I use the offline documentation 99% of the time (for this very reason, mostly), but when I link to Microsoft content through 4Guys articles and whatnot, it's frustrating that the help docs are so bloated. While it may not be practical, I think one way to fix this would be to require the page developers to access their own site using a modem.
(And, yes, I know I'm being a bit hypocritial here since I've created my fair share of bloated websites... in fact, I've created a page with a view state of over 800,000 bytes...)