WebPageTest

Marvin -

Thanks for the response. I'm probably compounding my problem by using a theme from CompleteVB - my home page (forum page currently) has over 100 requests - I think I could cut that by more than half if I could figure out how to sprite the background images. I've started looking at removing some of the images entirely (as you suggested).

I'll post back here once I know more.

-Al

(04-11-2011 08:59 PM)Marvin Wrote:  Al, I'm also running vBulletin (version 3.8.x in my case). But I'm using image sprites only for my home page, so I don't have any first-hand experience in implementing image sprites elsewhere within vBulletin. In the rest of my forum, believe it or not, I completely removed ALL images from the view of guests (and kept images to the bare minimum for members). The only single image guests see on my forum (excluding the home page images) is my site-wide logo of about 7KB. (I'm not counting my favicon.ico (318 bytes), and images added to posts by members.)

Look around your forum to see if you can also remove some unnecessary image files. You may be pleasantly surprised to find quite a few images you can happily live without!

P.S. To demonstrate how much unnecessary stuff the stock vBulletin currently has, which can be removed, here's a comparison: vBulletin.com has 68 http requests on its forum home (my forum home has 5 http requests). vBulletin.com has 61 http requests on forum view pages (my forum view pages only have 4 http requests each). vBulletin.com has 55 http requests on thread view pages (I only have 6 http requests - more on pages which contain a unit of Google Adsense)