OJ Board

SVG rendering is slow, when opening a volume we notice this slowness, and my computer is pretty fast so I can imagine some users will even get freezes.
Sometimes we can't even get the correct data from the svg generator in the server resulting in a xml error.

I have two alternative suggestions which would speed up loading:

- Redering the problems stats as a bitmap image on the server side and update it every 30 mins or 1 hour, this would solve the slowness and even spare server resources.

- Do the rendering on the client side using canvas tags, this wouldn't work on internet explorer but since the site doesn't work on it anyways it wouldn't be an issue (example: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Dr ... ith_Canvas

Keep up the good work.

About your suggestion about using JavaScript + Canvas: I don't think this is a good idea. This basically means "reimplement" a renderer using JavaScript using a new object that not many browsers support.

Your suggestion about using server-side images work, but I feel it is not optimal yet.

I have another idea. For volume sets, SVG graphics are used to display a simple progress bar. The same effect can be accomplished easily by using some clever CSS. And more: if the browser does not support CSS, it will still render the percentage text.

I will try to make a sample proof-of-concept page using that CSS trick.

P.S.: I'm using Opera 9.23 on a Pentium III 800 computer and I don't feel that volume set pages are very slow, but they are a little slower than "average" pages.