I've been spending a lot of time in Firebug with RoundCube the past few weeks. One thing I've noticed is that there are quite a lot of network requests to freshly load the front page. With the default theme there are around 45 separate requests for a little less than 250K. I was asking myself how to reduce the number of requests and was reminded of something interesting that I had noticed Gmail doing, and that is to consolidate many icons into a single image and then use CSS to position the image as the background of a fixed width/height block-level element.
As I went to implement this, I began to realize that not only does this approach reduce the number of network requests, but it also seems to simplify the code a bit. With this method the code doesn't have to worry at all about images or file names, but becomes somewhat image-agnostic by only specifying the *type* of behavior it would like to see in a given location. How that bahavior is implemented then becomes a simple matter of CSS.
Here is the consolidated image with not all but most of the usual icons:
https://natha.nkinka.de/devmail/skins/default/images/icons/rc_icons.png
And here are the patches to implement this:
http://code.nkinka.de/gitweb?p=roundcube.git;a=commitdiff;h=84a7acd0f42e3c30...
I found that doing this reduced the number of requests on a clean load of the main mailbox view from 45 to 35, which is fairly significant. It does add about 5K to the page size because it brings along a number of unneeded icons for that page. 10 less requests may not be perceptible for many people running on a fast machine with broadband Internet to a server that isn't very loaded. However, for a busy machine, perhaps an installation of RoundCube serving webmail for a university, for example, 10 less requests per fresh page load could make a noticeable difference. 10 less requests will probably also make a noticeable difference for those on a high latency connection, where 5K extra is less of a problem than 10 more network requests.
I have no idea whether this is of any use or interest to anyone else, but I thought I'd share my experiment with the list.
Nathan _______________________________________________ List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/dev/