Website slow only on Mac

It seems that our site (.Net based , ASP 3.5, minor use of Flash) runs awfully slow on Mac (OSX, FireFox 3.5)

e.g. http://www.cadastre.be/Belgique/Bruxelles_Capitale/Bruxelles

It usually happens on large pages (about 200k) - while the same page runs smoothly on the same machine running Windows VM.

My initial assumption was that it is something related to the created HTML code, however, the site does run slowly as well on other browsers (Safari, Chrome) - although a bit faster.

Are there are known aspx specific controls that causes Mac/Firefox to behave slowly ?

Is there something specific I should look in the created HTML code ?

Here's a short summary: 1. Happens only on Mac 2. All browsers 3. Validate HTML - looks quite good. Fixing several html / javascript errors didn't help 4. Javascript disabled on Browser 5. Flash disabled 6. Downloaded the full HTML for offline use and then opened it from the Browser - works very very fast. 7. Does not happen %100 of the time

Thanks

Well, the page is rather large (over 100000 bytes), and there are a few validation errors.

On the home page there is a script tag before the DTD that needs to go into the head section.
Running the page through the Firefox Error Console brings up problems with the .ajax__tab_header class in the stylesheet not being converted into a valid image path: <%=WebResource("AjaxControlToolkit.Tabs.tab-line.gif")%> so it might be better to serve static stylesheets straight from a media server, and do any dynamic work by applying classes in the generated HTML.
Also, running the page through the W3C validator brings up a load of simple markup errors.
I haven't checked, but you may also have too many HTTP calls per page - try using YSlow to see which components are slow to load. Steve Souders covers this issue in chapter 1 of High Performance Websites.
Finally, there's a character encoding mismatch - you still have some iso-8859-1 hanging around - it should be UTF-8 throughout (check: HTML, server, database etc.).

The above issues all add up, and probably need to be addressed before you test again.

Thanks for the detailed comment.I've fixed most of the issues mentioned above:1. script before dtd2. converted to image path3. I ran my page on W3C validator.Fixed several issues (mostly by adding CDATA to javascript code).But I have to admit that most of the warnings/errors are simple html issues - which should not effect the speed in modern browsers.5. fixed the encoding issue as well.Now, I've uploaded this fixed version to my test server:http://testfr.cadastre.be/Belgique/Bruxelles_Capitale/BruxellesStill - awfully slow - and only on Mac (all browsers) .

Ranch 2010-04-19 18:38:57

And got straight A's in all of YSlow tests...

Ranch 2010-04-19 18:52:12

Moreover - When I run the HTML source code (after downloading it from the site) it runs on the same browser fast a lightening.So, I'm almost sure it is not something about HTML validity or code.

Ranch 2010-04-19 23:35:43

Can you put up the rendered static code somewhere (i.e. what the browser eventually gets), and I'll try that? Then we can pin down the issue a bit more. I had it loading for over 1/2 hr today in Firefox on this Mac, and still nothing appeared.

Dave Everitt 2010-04-29 08:10:15

Still no relevant solution found. I've had to change hosting provider.Moved to a dedicated server, et voila ! everything is working great !Previous hosting provider still denies there's an issue with Mac. I still suspect it might be something with its Firewall.

Ranch 2010-06-06 16:28:21

Glad it's solved. However, the URLs above are still slow for me - do you have a new URL to test?

Dave Everitt 2010-06-08 09:39:35

ansaurus

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Website slow only on Mac

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