The New Powerful CSS and Javascript
Compression System, RokBooster
Increase the speed of your site by enabling the RokBooster plug-in. This advanced extensions will compress and combine your CSS and JavaScript into as few files as possible each. RokBooster can dramatically reduce the number of HTTP calls a browser has to make, and sending those compressed files GZipped means your pages will load faster with less load on your server.
It differentiates between the pages so if you have a particular combination of scripts on one page, and a different combination on another, two files will be created and loaded independently, allowing your site to load much faster.
Key Features:
- Combine and compress CSS and JavaScript into as few files as possible
- GZip compression used to send CSS and JavaScript files
- Compress Inline CSS and JavaScript
- Customizable cache timeout
- Background rendering, so initial file processing won't slow your users down
- Full page scan allows for non-header JavaScript and CSS to be included
- Ability to ignore specific CSS and JavaScript files
NOTE: Clearing the Joomla cache will remove the RokBooster compressed cache files causing them to regenerate on the next page hit
What does this mean in the real world?
To see how this effects a template in the a real world scenario, we'll examine the front-page of the Voxel demo site from a very average 5MB cable connection. We used the Net panel in Firebug for Firefox to get our data.
CSS Files
We will see how the site loads the CSS without RokBooster enabled:
As you can see, because Voxel template allows for maximum flexibility with almost unlimited combinations of header/body/footer/backgrounds etc, there are multiple CSS files loaded as well as some of the CSS files needed for the modules used.
Let's turn on RokBooster and see what we get now:
As you can clearly see the 25 original requests have been reduced to 1 request. The 186.5KB of CSS files has been reduced to just 33.6KB (18% of the original size!), and the original 423 ms it took to download the CSS files has been reduced to 166 ms (250% faster!). A drastic improvement!
Javascript Files
Now to see the effects on the JavaScript side. Voxel is an extremely feature-packed template, and we've tried to show off as much as possible on the front page of the demo. This makes it an excellent example to really see the power of RokBooster in action.
First without RokBooster enabled:
Once again, there's a lot of JavaScript there to power all the features and functionality we are showing off on the front page. This of course is a somewhat extreme case, and you probably would not have this much functionality turned on at any one time.
Let's enable RokBooster and see what we get:
Those original 22 requests for the JavaScript elements have been reduced to just 1 request. The 510.5KB has been reduced to just 140.7KB (26% of the original size), and the 806 ms it took before has been reduced to just 322 ms (250% faster!).
Of course RokBooster is not only particular useful with Voxel due to the large amounts of CSS and JavaScript Files, but RokBooster can be applied to any template that implements addScript() and addStyleSheet() functions and should improve your browsing experience significantly.
Download: RokBooster Now
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