Does OpenX slow loading time significantly?

[LD]

I'm sure there's lot of factors, but in general should you keep the number of zones on a page under a certain amount (2,3..10?). Any other optimization pointers?

I've been going crazy with it since I figured out how to make it work, now my site seems a little slow....

tanks!

[Simon]

It can depend on several things. For example if you're loading your graphics from a dedicated directory on your server or if you're loading iFrames and other sponsor-hosted advertising materials. I've also had better success choosing to serve banners from a dedicated directory versus saving them in the OpenX database.

Regarding how many zones on a page, I use a lot of zones on some sites/pages. One thing you definitely want to do is use the Single Page Call method, which will cut down on the number of HTTP requests your page has to send to serve the banners.

Aside from those things, you can also consider ad positioning in your page design, so that some or most of the other important things will load quickly even if the overall page takes longer to load. As a simple example, making sure the sponsor-hosted graphics aren't at the top of the page can help ensure that someone else's slow server response won't mean a surfer clicks away from your page because he's not seeing anything interesting soon enough.

HTH

[LD]

Thanks Simon. I am serving a lot of iFrames with OpenX...I'm going to pull those out of the rotation and see if things speed up.

[Cleo]

I tend to keep my ads to only one or sometimes two per page to keep things from slowing down.

[LD]

That single page call thing seems to work much better, even with iframes. Now I gotta reinsert code on the pages....fortunately I discovered the slowness after applying openx to a couple of pages....glad I didn't do like...200

[Simon]

I can easily call 9-10 different ads on a page via the single page call method without seeing much difference from having less ads on those pages.

Regarding having to redo pages. If you use templates you want the single page call in the header template so it's available to all your pages.

Also - if you're not using templates, do yourself a favor and stick some extra includes, either php or ssi, in the HEAD and at the beginning and end of each page's BODY tags. They can point to some empty files on your server so nothing gets inserted until you want to do something like add the OpenX single page call, or the Link Organizer tracking code, or Google analytics code to all of your pages. Then you can add that code to those formerly empty files and it'll get included from then on.

Most things I build now, except free sites and galleries, use some kind of template system, but using those 'empty' includes saved me a ton of time on earlier sites over the years.