Well I’ve seen others complain that it seems to take longer to load pages on Brainking – well at least longer then it use to, and even though I stayed away from complaining about it, I did see the same thing. 2-7 seconds to load each page. Ugh.

So I did some tweaking with the settings, and found some things that really help – 0-2 seconds per page load most of the time! Here are the tips:

Use Firefox if you can. Faster then Internet Explorer.

NOTE: For the settings below – some are for members only – so if are a pawn and are unable to change certain settings, that could be the reason.

BrainKing Settings: http://brainking.com/en/Settings


General Tab: Get rid of things you don’t need or use. What I use:

UNCHECK – Show menu on game pages (less info to load – faster load time)

UNCHECK – Show game filter on the main page (less info to load – faster load time)

UNCHECK – Show tips of the day (less info to load – faster load time)

UNCHECK – Show tournament tip (less info to load – faster load time)

UNCHECK – Show “Yesterdays active player” (less info to load – faster load time)

UNCHECK – “Display backgroung “BrainKing” image (less info to load – faster load time)

Number of my best BKR shown on main page: NONE (less info – faster load)

Number of games shown on the main page: I like mine set at All, but if you have a lot of games – picking something smaller can help load time

Submit move actions – currently 20 actions available – each one takes a little more space – so only pick the ones you use. I personally have 8 picked, but could easily bring that down to about 4.

JavaScript Tab: Get rid of things you don’t need or use. What I use:

UNCHECK – Active pulldown game menu. This is the list of 20 games in the upper left corner. I always loved it there, but once I started to think about it – I never used it – so like others (less info to load – faster load time)

UNCHECK – Enable fast lookup at search forms – not sure exactly what this one was, but don’t think I used it – so away it goes.

*LOTS OF SPEED* - UNCHECK – Show message preview at the Message box.

• This one will show you a preview when you have something in your message box.
• This will also show you a preview of public boards in your favorites
  list. I have 20 public boards in my favourites board list - so that means the last message from each of those 20 boards would load on each page that shows the favourite boards list.
• This will also show you a tournament preview in a tournament game (That is mouse over the tournament link on a game page, and the tournament status page pops up). I liked this option at first - but this one of my biggest time savers - since for example, a 7 player tournament playing 2 games each counted as an extra 12,933 characters in EVERY page load. So if you have a game which takes 5 moves to play, that is 5 extra times that 12,000+ extra characters has to be loaded!
• So getting rid of this option was one of my best choices!

Autosave interval – I have none, but don’t think it will slow page load if you have it set.

Smiley windows: I have on mouse click since I have when my mouse accedently moves over it and it tries to pop up – but should not slow down initial page load.

UNCHECK – Show context menu – less info to load, faster page load.

IN A GAME:

When you get ready to submit a move – there is the game list that you can choose to go to next. Each game is written into the page source adding to the time it takes to bring up that page. So if you don’t use this option – HIDE IT (If you have few games, probable not a big deal - have many then you can start to see the slow down)

Game Notations – each game has this on the right hand side. If you don’t use it, hide it. Long games can have hundreds+ moves – again, less data to load on the page, the quicker it can go.

OK - that is all for now. Anyone else have other suggestions or ideas?

[AGAIN - these are what I choose - if you use certain option I say turn off, then don't turn them off - use them. Biggest thing is to get rid of the things you don't use.]