What should be a realistic initial load time for a SL2B2 project with a .xap file of about6.89 MB? Thanks
Hi, Well....Since the xap file can even include necessary media files that will depend on the visitor. You may notice Microsoft is making it a practice now to use the Silverlight globe while xap content loads. http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=66739 For most people I'd suggest you try to keep it within 20 seconds. Salute, Mark
Mark, Thanks for the reply - for most people visiting my site www.fbsldev.com their load time experience is pushing and sometimes exceeding 1 minute. mb
Yup...Took me 61 seconds just now. Can you lighten it up any? For example, are you using very large PNG files? If so you can at times save 2MB per image by going to 15% compression.
Mark, All totaled (png's and jpeg's) for the whole site = approx. 4.8 MB. What's odd - is I took the .xap from 10.4 MB yesterday (by lightening up / compressing) to 6.89 today - and I see absolutely no improvement on load time. mb
It loaded for me in 18 seconds, but we'reon avery fast connection here. 7 MB of initial download for your index page is still far too much, even for users on fast connections. At the very least you should design a static index pageand then let people deal with the download on subsequent pages. Making visitors wait that long for the first page toload is going to turn many of them away. Overall - sorry Microsoft - I would be very hesitant to use Silverlight (or anything that requires a visitor to download a program and restart their browser)for a corporate site. It's kind of like opening a store but keeping the front door locked.Some potential customers will knock and wait for you to come and let them in, butmost of themwill justgo across the street to the store with the open door.
There are ways to enable a Silverlight application so that the initial download is lightweight and other application dependancies are lazy loaded or delay loaded in the background by the Silverlight application. How far you can go with this is dependant on what is absolutely crucial to come down the wire on application startup and initial operation. This is a design decision that is application specific - only you will know what you can optimize here. There is also a way to apply 'branding' to the page displayed when the Silverlight runtime is not installed so it looks more interesting than the standard Microsoft 'install SL' image, allow the user to download and install the runtime and then automatically refresh the Silverlight enabled webpage with JavaScript once the plug-in is present. With a little bit of research / reading and you'll have both of these issues cracked. With the 2nd problem highlighted by mjp, Silverlight and Flash suffer equally..both require a plug-in to be installed. The only difference is that Flash has been around for 10 years or so and is installed in most browsers because there are a lot of live flash enabled corporate websites around but Silverlight by comparison is in its infancy. In all technologies that I can think of, there are good and bad ways to implement it and since Silverlight (and flash) is all about a rich user experience, a slow loading Silverlight application is definitely a bad one. That said there are some nice features in the http://www.fbsldev.com/ application
