Expertflyer page size/load time question
 

I've been having problems with Expertflyer taking a very long time to load on my computer traveling with slow connections and anywhere on my PDA. My PDA says that the Expertflyer site is 500k+. The Expertflyer team insists that their page is much much smaller and takes only a few seconds to load. I tried to check with an outside reference and found http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/. This site says that their page is 380kb+ and should take 305 seconds to load at 14.4. That's about what it takes on my PDA. Note that this isn't all about my PDA. I'm in Puerto Rico this week and have a wireless connection for my computer. Expertflyer is the slowest thing to load after CNN and Seattletimes.com which both include many graphics.

If you're an Expertflyer user would you please weigh in and let me and/or they know who's right? If you find I am right then please send a comment to the Expertflyer team
[email protected].

Is their answer below relevant? Is their page large or small? I'm of the belief that they could do some simple things to make their page faster to load and wish they'd do it.

Here is what the Expertflyer support team says:
"Thank you for your email. I'm not sure where you get the figure of 500k from but the home page HTML is only ~12k and the largest image on the page is only ~17k. There are additional CSS and JS includes but they don't add up to 500k either. There are 2 things happening here. First, unlike CNN, we only have servers in the US so when you access us from a foreign location the request have to travel around the world instead of being retrieved from a server local to your country. The second is that we SSL our entire site which means that nothing is cached on your computer and as such the entire site is loaded every time you visit. We will be changing that in our next release so it will help you with your speed issue."

Reply from Expertflyer
 

From: "The ExpertFlyer.com Team" <[email protected]>
To: "Paul..."
X-pstn-addresses: from <[email protected]> [100/3]


As we have said before the next release which will be coming shortly will fix these issues. However posting it on frequent flyer forums and forwarding us the answers doesn't make the work go any faster or affect our development efforts.

Thank you,
The ExpertFlyer.com Team

My post to another forum generated several useful replies which I forwarded to Expertflyer. Those replies are below:

Is this a new problem? I've found ExpertFlyer extremely difficult to
use over slow (particularly high-latency) links from day one. It seems
that each request you make turns into a very large number of HTTP
connections back and forth, before the response page is rendered.
(Look at the bottom left corner of your browser to see how many times
it is asking for new data.) As a result, I've found it almost unusable
over high-latency connections like cellphone-based PDAs. Throw an
international link into the mix (like trying to access from Hong Kong)
and I can see why it would be a nightmare.

My guess is that they test the stuff over broadband connections in the
United States, which is why they don't see a problem...

...
This is nothing new. I write them after each "upgrade" noting that the
changes they have made have further degraded performance on my
BlackBerry and other PDAs. They are always quick to respond that
a "thin" version of the site is in the works, but absolutely every
change thus far have limited my ability to access the site on a
wireless client.

I have assessed that they do not consider wireless access to be a
priority, or the group of wireless users to be a significant potential
customer base.

...
They don't need a "thin" version of the site so much as they need to
re-code it in a less brain-damaged way. There's absolutely no reason
why you shouldn't be able to perform each of the site's operations
(search availability, flight status, fare search, etc.) with a single
HTTP POST operation sent to the server, followed by a single page of
response. Instead, they have some kind of insane back-and-forth
protocol (that I confess I haven't examined closely) that kills
performance over high-latency links and that could easily be done with
a single request-reply pair.

...
Fair enough, but even disregarding the speed issues, their site
challenges the anemic BlackBerry browser and a "no-frills" site would
be highly welcome from me.

...
EF is using web2.0/AJAX which may not be compatible with some of the
mobile browsers out there.

IMO, they need to invest in a scaled down version of the site for
their mobile community. Something similar to aa2go.com.

And yes, I realize that this means more work for them, and at a time
where they are having larger issues, but it needs to be done. I also
seem to recall that they have tweaked the regular UI a couple of times
over the past six months. It looks nice, now move along to fix other
things.

...
Looks like EVERY ExpertFlyer page loads a lot of large javascript
scripts and stylesheets, whether needed or not. There are 15 scripts
and 10 stylesheets just on the front page (where you enter
username/password) and every other page.

But that doesn't annoy me as much as the service problems I've been
experiencing the last couple of weeks, which are making me consider
not renewing my subscription when it expires in a couple of months.

I agree, the last two revisions of ExpertFlyer have added additional bloat and cause page load times to increase on slow speed connections. I suggested that they make an 'Expert' page, since even the flight query screen is polluted with instructions now. They said it is an 'expert' page, and was fine. In my opinion, it's migrating away from a true 'Expert' interface and moving to something to attract the novice. Maybe they should start calling it 'dumbflyer'...

Blackberry usability used to be pretty good - now that has gone into the toilet.
They did a survey on mobile usage a while back, and their findings said that not a reasonable amount of people wanted such access - so it hasn't been developed.

It's a great service, and provides an alternative to KVS in that it doesn't require a Windows-Client to access. But I think they are getting away from their original intent. I really don't understand the continuing bloat that they add to the page when the functionality is essentially the same as many revisions ago.

Thanks SNA Flyer. I hope more people will post and we can draw attention from Expertflyer. I hope we can show consensus that their web developers have gone cute and damaged usabilty in the process.

I see I was quoted above ;).

So I am going to assume that the EF customer support guy that answered your question looked at the files size of the home page and saw that it had a footprint of ~17K. And he alludes to the size of the includes, but I doubt he considered the size of the includes on the includes and the images.

I can tell you even on a WM5 device with HSPDA that the site is slow. The suggestion of an "expert" version of EF would be ideal. aa2go would be a good model.

It's really a bit confounding that with the name "expert" in the title usability is no longer at a quick, intuitive "expert" level.

And to speak to the lack of good mobile support a bit more: Some of the times that I REALLY need this product are in an airport when a flight has been canceled and all I have is my mobile device to check alternatives.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this!

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions on this issue.

We are making mods to the the site to reduce the load times of the pages particularly the home page. This will be introduced in the not too distant future.

As for mobile specific version, this is on the roadmap as well. A recent poll of our subs indicated that very few of them had an interest in a mobile version and a larger number of subs had an interest in features that have taken a higher priority in our development. However, we recognize mobile access is a growing way to use services such as EF and it is very important to those who do use mobile access to use a quick and efficient site. As such, we are taking steps to move up its development.

When the time comes to beta test our mobile version we will be contacting those who have expressed an interest in this version to participate in its testing.

Thank you,
EFV

EFV,

I just renewed on the annual plan with hopes that my voice would be counted. Please consider me one of the ones that use EF on a mobile device regularly.

Thank you,

JAB

Ditto. And keep up the good work.

Thank you EV. Your answer is much more constructive than the one I got from customer service saying there is no problem.

Hate to revive a 5-year old thread but I'm finding that this is still a problem with Expertflyer -- slow page load times when it comes to Fare Information search requests. We're talking complete browser freeze here.. and it's not my computer or internet connection that's causing it.

Why so slow? I'd like to think EF has made some progress on this front over the last 5 years.. or perhaps it's intentional? I am considering a different subscription site because of this issue.

Hi izzik, it has nothing to do with your Internet connection or loading the page. Since the Fare Information search can return up to 500 fares, that are both sortable and filterable, there is a lot of JavaScript processing behind the scenes to make that happen. Even so, on most browsers (ie: not IE 8 or prior) the process takes a second or two at most. If you are running Windows Vista or 7, make sure you upgrade to IE 9.

If you are running XP and still using IE 8, another way to speed up the fare display is to limit how many you see at a time using the drop down selector where it says "with X results per page" in the blue box at the top.

Hmm, I've also quite some problems on mobile devices.

Also from the office, probably due to a firewall (that causes no problems on all the other sites I often use) I can't use all the input fields/dropdown menus (disregarding which browsers I use). Some dropdown menues don't load and I can't input data in the respective fields.

When I try to use FRA as the code for my Frankfurt airport almost all the time a list with possible meanings appear and if I'm not very precise instead of the intended Frankfurt a tiny airport of Franca is chosen. I don't need that kind of help, it just stops efficient data entry for me.

I would want to use a very basic mobile expertflyer from mobile devices, where I just input airports as 3 letter codes, dates as input without any dropdown menus, and the necessary options as tick-boxes. Fares and airlines just as a list of codes like J, C, D, Z or LH, LX, OS. No graphics, no fancy items.

Make sure Javascript is turned on. If you are referring to the auto-complete airline/airport fields, you can just type in the 2 or 3 letter code and then tab to the next field without needed the auto-complete.

Again, just type in FRA and tab to the next field. There is a built in delay in the auto-complete so you can do that.

We have a mobile version for that: http://m.expertflyer.com