So I've been doing a little basic testing of my own on the front page using Firefox and a certain unmentionable program that can be used to block flash items. I conducted these tests on my oldest computer with the following specs: AMD Athelon XP 2600+, 1GB RAM, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.
Step 1: All elements turned on
What I found was interesting, the processor usage was pegged at 100% when the front page is idling and scrolled all the way to the top. As soon as I scroll below the top flash elements, the processor usage drops to 5-10%. This leads me to believe that the flash elements at the top are to blame for the incredibly high CPU usage.
Step 2: Ads turned off only, Recent news on, Charts on-
Processor usage was between 94%-100% with the ads turned off. No significant difference.
Step 3: Ads off, Recent News flash animation off-
Processor usage dropped to 80%-90% while idling. Notable difference.
Step 4: Ads off, Recent News on, Charts off-
Processor usage dropped to 50%-60% while idling. I was very surprised, the charts flash object seems to take a ton of processing power, even more than the recent news animation.
Step 5: Ads on, Recent News off, Charts off-
Processor runs at 5%-10% while idling.
Suggestions:
In my opinion, performance is more important than eye candy. I would suggest turning down the effects on the news ticker to make it more like a simple slide show, with maybe a simple fade effect between news stories. This gives you the same function without killing everybody's processor. Also, the charts take up an unacceptable level of CPU usage for their function in my opinion. The animation should be simplified as much as possible on this one. Another option would be to have the option to choose a 'Simple Chart' instead of the full blown 'CPU Hog' chart. Those two items are where I think you should focus your attention for performance improvement. It may be a good idea to test this on a somewhat slower system as well (older P4, 2.5GHz, Athelon XP, etc), as it's important that any website run reasonably well on processors such as these.
These are just my opinions, I love the site layout, just think it could use a few tweaks performance wise.
