This Affino release is all about performance. We have worked hard to deliver great reliability and improved performance for every page view. This has meant looking deep into how Affino generates pages for bots, guest and members, and improving all aspects.

New Affino Production Process = Better Quality Product

To do this we have completely revamped key aspects of the Affino production cycle, in particular all aspects of how we test it: we have established new Affino Benchmarks; rolled out a new Affino load test facility; developed new automated QA processes on top of the work of the existing quality assurance team; we’re using great load testing services to identify Affino’s scaling parameters; and finally running new low-level monitoring solutions to see what’s happening deep in the core Java engines.

This process has been essential to help us identify and resolve a host of low-level issues which have come to the for with Affino recently, but which have been having an escalating impact for some time. The great news is that the deep focus that we’ve had on the issues affecting Affino means that the 6.0.11 release has unmatched levels of performance and scalability. The new benchmarks also mean that we will be able to identify with every future Affino release how it performs when compared with the current one.

All in all the new approach has helped us to identify over a hundred potential optimisations which have been implemented in this release.

Elements in Transition

We have made some tough decisions to boost Affino’s page delivery speed. Ultimately users compare the speed Affino’s pages are delivered in compared to other comparable sites, whether they are blogs, stores, magazines, recruitment sites, corporate sites or communities. Affino does more than all comparable platforms but it must do so whilst also optimising the experience for the end user, and there is no doubt that the speed at which a page loads is an incredibly important part of this.

Most of the elements which make Affino faster in this release revolve around smarter page delivery, improved caching, improved scalability, improved stability, smarter handling of sessions and other great enhancements that take nothing away from the existing Affino experience. We have made some big decisions

If you produce a product or service that you want to promote online, then you have to create content. From an SEO perspective you need to have very tight control over the release of this content so that it adds value to your online presence and becomes a key aspect of building your brand and driving sales online.

SEO is largely ’first come, first served’. Google Base, essential for promoting products with pricing online, actively filters out duplicate content and bars sites which consistently have duplicate (spam as far as Google is concerned) content. More importantly, being consistently the first with content ’Scoops’ means that you will build up an online following, with plenty of incoming links and consistent traffic growth.

The Winning Mentality

It is essential to build up a Publishing mentality and that everyone in the organisation who is involved on the sales and marketing side is following the same schedule. You need to generate regular content and you need to promote your Scoops with maximum effect. Your content should be jealously guarded and used to make the maximum impact. 

When it comes to online publishing, content is king and timing is everything. If you have exclusive content you have to ’use it or lose it’. Most of the web is derivative, nine out of ten stories you see are derived from other sources up the line. Being the first means that you are quoted and referred to, and more importantly you get in at the head of the pack in the Google index. Which means that when everyone else is searching on the subject they see your page and it builds up a virtuous cycle.

You should always look to release exclusive content, both information and media through your site whenever you are launching a new product or service. You should develop two sets of promotional content: the first content set is intended purely for your own promotional purposes. This content should first be placed on your site first (with watermarks where necessary), and only when it has been indexed by the key search engines, should it be promoted through the leading social media channels.

These media spaces are tightly controlled, and wherever possible automation should be used to maximize productivity and ens... More

One of the goals we set ourselves for the 5.5.15 release of Affino was to reduce the average file size for Affino web pages. There are many benefits to this: Faster page loads Improved SEO Less data traffic generated Less processing power and energy required Snappier experience Improved 3G access Fewer browser errors Improved caching Content delivery network offloading Lower cost hosting Higher conversion rates

In this release we focused on shifting as much of the JavaScript and CSS code out of the core web page and through to separate CSS and JS files. The results have been dramatic, if we analyse the Comrz homepage we have reduced some size indicators by up to 64%: words 38% chars no space 48% chars space 45% lines 64% Page Length reduced by 51% Characters excluding spaces reduced by 48% Chars with spaces reduced by 45% The number of lines reduced by 64%

The file size reduction has been dramatic, but is only part of the story. The fact is that we’re shifting a great deal of code from being dynamically generated through to static files. These files can be cached by browsers, proxies and pre-caching servers, which means that the pages load up considerably faster. We’ve also changed the way the pages load up. It means that all the dynamic elements only load up once the overall page has downloaded and has been rendered.

The end result is that the end-user experience is now much snappier, and once the new Affino release has been fully rolled out, all Affino sites will benefit from significantly improved hosting server performance.