3 replies to this topic

[train99]

I am doing something this week that should get a bunch of visitors to a single page. I spoke with my server admin, and he suggested changing the page from a PHP to plain HTML in order to lower server usage.

I didn't think of the style sheet until this afternoon, and he's on vacation so I cannot ask him.

The style sheet is 5 lines. Right now it's an external file. Either way it won't effect my bandwidth, but will making the server hand off the style.css page to each visitor have much effect on server usage over a million page views?

I might be overestimating the demand, but I'm not that far off. I would rather be prepared, than have problems.

Thanks,
Terry

[Randy]

You're not looking at that much of a difference Terry. But you're right that having an external css file does cause an extra call for file retrieval at the server level.

I'm not at all sure it's going to make any difference one way or another with server load, but if it makes you feel better incorporating the css schtuff into your page code would be the way to go since you're talking about a single page.

[Clintorius]

It is a bit more complicated because if the pageview is a immediate revisit from the same user the external stylesheet will not be loaded again because it is cached by the browser. For large stylesheets and a site with sticky pages this may be important.

C.

[OldWelshGuy]

Yep I agree that for a large CSS data amaount, external will speed up delivery and cut down bandwidth/datatransfer because of the local cache.