Themes

Urs,

thank you for the performance testing. The graphics of Custom corners do make it a little slower but I noticed today one strange thing from README file - text:

You must not write hooks as comma separated lists of elements like

td#middle-column div.bt,
div#middle-column div.bt {
    ...
}

in Chameleon themes because the Chameleon engine can't handle these comma lists. Please write two seperate statements instead.
td#middle-column div.bt {
    ...
}
div#middle-column div.bt {
    ...
}

Both Chameleon and Custom Corners user_styles.css have several such tags - is this text "Chameleon engine can't handle these comma lists" valid or should those tags be changed?

After further investigation I can show new facts and figures.

First the much slower page rendering on the PC in Firefox was caused by a broken extension. After I removed the extension page rendering takes only a little longer due to the slower CPU.

Second no need to worry about the theme "Custom corners" rendering speed. It's not significant slower than other themes. When files don't come from the cache the load times differ more. After some JavaScript enhancements it's performance got even better.

Page data

In my tests I wanted to know the page creating time and the time until the page is ready displayed in the browser. To get an overview I selected 6 pages: startpage, 2 course pages (one short and one longer with several images), a glossary, and 2 admin pages (frontpage settings and user settings.

Measuring

To get a good average I measured in Firefox:
_ 10 rounds loading the 6 pages with the standard theme as a reference
_ switch to the other theme
_ 10 rounds loading the 6 pages
_ closing the browser (to avoid slowing down due to eventual memory leaks)
_ 10 rounds loading the 6 pages with the other theme
_ switch to standard theme
_ 10 rounds loading the 6 pages with the standard theme as a reference

Therefore standard theme and the other theme alternate in the graphs.

The graph shows that there are only quite small differences in the loading time for different themes. The pages with a theme with several JavaScripts needs a bit longer, but not dramatically.

With text replacement filters active the server needs to work more, but the page load time is only minimal slower with the standard theme. (Shown in the middle before the numbers with the disabled cache)

The higher load times on the right show how much longer pages load when the browser cache is empty. (for example with first page loads or https connections).

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Load times of the single pages comparing standard and custom corners theme

Quite interesting is also looking at the different generation and loading times of the 6 page types.

The graph for page generation time on the server with cache on and off

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and the page loading time in Firefox with cache on and off

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