If you would prefer the short version of this post, read the next paragraph and stop.
VKitty faster. Me happy. Your computer do work too.
And now for the intelligent version:
It had been bothering me that VKitty needed to ask the database server for information every single time a VKitty user viewed a cat or a user — sometimes multiple requests per page load. So I went on Google and searched for cross-browser client-side storage and found what I was looking for. Sure, I had to tweak it a bit, but soon, I had it working perfectly on every browser that supported VKitty to begin with.
Then, I noticed that for every page load, VKitty tells the browser to download 20-something files, most of which every single time. So I pulled out my Ant manual and made a compiler for VKitty’s JavaScripts. Soon, I had a program that took every script that was normally loaded in VKitty, combined them into one, compressed it, compressed it again, and uploaded the super-compressed script to the server. I was able to cut the JavaScript to a third of what it was. That’s a 66.6% savings in JavaScript alone!
Now, VKitty will load at least three times faster and request data from the server a lot less, causing a smoother user experience and a lot less load on the server.
Feedback time!
Is 5 minutes the right amount of time to hold data in your computer’s memory? Should there be a way to turn the caching off? Or is VKitty just a worthless piece of trash that I should never have started working on?
Five minutes sounds about right. Once everyone has a chance to try it you’ll have a better idea of how it’s working. I don’t think I’d need to turn caching off–might there be a reason someone would want to do that?
There are people out there that are extremely paranoid, along with the biggest problem that caching brings up (VKitty data can change within 5 minutes of a user receiving it)