Faster Loading

A few weeks ago I began thinking about how I could improve load times. Yahoo! has a document online called Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site, which is quite good. I used that document to make several changes in the 1.3 release of SQL Buddy that resulted in a faster application.

The first step that I took was to use gzip compression for serving css and javascript files. This brought significant improvements, especially when loading pages with an empty cache. The next thing that I looked into was reducing the number of http requests. Even when browsers have a cached copy of a file, they still ping the server to check for a newer copy of the file. Therefore, the more files that the browser has to check, the slower the app loads.

After performing these changes (and a few others) I could tell that the application was more responsive. I performed a few benchmarks to see what the difference was. The charts illustrates the difference in loading times between the latest version and the 1.2.9 release.

As you can see, pages are now loading in about 50-75% of the time that they used to take. Note that this time is how long it takes to load all html, css, javascript, and images. I was surprised that Firefox was able to load the entire page in just over a second! I should also mention that these tests were performed with a remote server – if you are using the app locally you will see even quicker loading times.

SQLite Support

With the 1.3 release, experimental support for SQLite has been added. If you have SQLite installed on your system, the login screen will let you choose between logging in to MySQL and SQLite. It still needs tweaking and I would love to hear your feedback.

In Conclusion

This project is now hosted on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/sql-buddy/. If you are interested in contributing, contact me and I will get it set up. There is a list of issues available on the Google Code site, so if you just want to help out, that would be a really good place to start.

I am really excited by how much this project has grown over the past few months. It was first released in the middle of May, about 4 months ago. Since then, many of you have contacted me to report a bug, suggest a feature, or simply say that you enjoy the app. The interest from all over the world has been surprising. As I was putting the finishing touches on the 1.3 release, I watched as the total number of downloads crossed 10,000. I am surprised that the project has received this much attention, and I would like to thank everyone that has given it a chance. This project is just getting started