Site is a bit laggy (scrolling) or using a lot of memory?

Question

We're in the middle of re-designing our. We decided to put the home page up, and a select number of pages, then add more as we convert them to the new design. Users on even slightly old computers are noticing a very laggy scroll on the home page, as if there aren't enough resources to move around the page or to render it quickly enough. The whole thing is viewable, just feels intensive on the user side.

http://www.greendayauthority.com

As best I can tell, this only on the home page with all the news items. Loading a page (like the tour page: http://www.greendayauthority.com/music/tour.php) seems to scroll through just fine.

Page load times aren't too bad (relatively, for our site) - but I do notice a slight lag even on my macbook pro (a year old) when scrolling on a page. The load on our server doesn't seem any more or less significant either.

I know ads cause some problems with all the includes and such, but even after removing those, there's not a significant improvement. Can you guys help point in the right direction of what we could do better, or tools to use to investigate this?

I used Google Chrome's Task Manager to see that our site uses over 45MB of memory to load, which seems like a lot - but I don't really know as I've never looked too far into this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The high volume of iframes is likely a contributor. These can get problematic very quickly when you have too many. Each of those tidbits such as the Facebook 'like' button has its own iframe.

Answer 2

JS and Flash are probably your main memory hogs (along with CSS3 effects and IE Filters).

Have you optimized your actual Javascript code? You could have a memory leaks somewhere or jsut being doing something inefficiently.

In terms of the flash video you might want to implement a "player thumbnail" that doesnt actually load the player SWF or its FLV content until activated by the user via a click on the image.

But at the end of the day you can do a lot to reduce load time/bandwidth, but there is little control you have over memory consumption - especially with a media site like this. For what its worth Im using a 2 year old Mac Mini (4GB RAM) with FF 3.6 and it was super snappy for me... I even have 4 other tabs open, Eclipse, MS Word, Acrobat Pro and VMWare Fusion.