Users Experience Long Loading Time

Issue

It seems that all the content is loaded at once, so once it's loaded, each page is displayed very quickly. The problem is the initial delay

Resolution

WebWorks Help does exhibit higher load delays when accessed by extremely remote users. We created the "WebWorks Help Optimizer" project to start the process of improving this performance.

http://wiki.webworks.com/DevCenter/Projects/WebWorksHelp/Optimizer

Two areas have emerged.

1. Ensure that your server is configured to emit expires headers. Often this will cause .js and .css files to be reloaded continually. Details are at the bottom of the wiki page.

2. Consider using the WebWorks Optimizer script to reduce the file count.

The optimizer effectively reduces the support file count required to display the help system. It is presently in R&D mode while we learn what level of performance is required by users for them to achieve success.

NOTE: WebWorks Help does perform incremental loading of content. Not all pages or support files are downloaded on initial request. However, that help runtime is, by default, large and distributed across a number of files.

You can test out what the performance delta might be for your own documentation by reviewing the section on "Benchmark Info" and recording time deltas for our own 2008.4 documentation, optimized and unoptimized.