For browsers that support Google Gears, VKitty had always requested permission to store data on the user’s computer. This has been removed. Although it might cause VKitty to be a bit slower, we’ll scare less people away by asking about data storage.

Most browsers download a capped amount of files from each server at a time. This means that only two VKitty images (affiliate badges, items, etc.) would be downloaded by the browser at a time.

To help VKitty load faster, item images have been split up into 10 different subdomains, and affiliate badges and style data each have their own subdomains.

All affiliate badges go on aff.vkitty.net, stylesheets and scripts go on s.vkitty.net, and item images (unequipped only so far) go on datiX.vkitty.net, where X is the last digit of the item ID.

For a quick demonstration of how much this helps, imagine you’re on the homepage of VKitty and you have twenty different items in your inventory and one cat. Let’s say your browser can only download 2 files per hostname at a time and each file takes one second to download.

On the homepage in this scenario, there would be two stylesheets, a script, 7 affiliate badges, a cat image, and 20 item images, a total of 31 things for your browser to download once it has the HTML of the page.

With a single hostname, it would take 17 seconds to load the page, including the HTML content. With our new system, it would only take 3 seconds to load everything except the affiliate badges and 6 seconds total.

A savings of 11-14 seconds is pretty big. Of course, each file on VKitty hopefully loads in under a second, so the savings will be smaller, but still 18-35% of the total time to load the page, assuming all of the files loaded in the same amount of time.