It turns out that the RW8 file size of my website www.palmwood.nl on my Mac is more than 10GB! I cannot find the reasons for this; the resources are jpegs and 10 mp3-files, not bigger than 1 GB all together. My other website www.tonjenner.nl is pretty much the same, jpegs and some mp3’s. The RW8 file size here is 140 MB all together.
What am I doing wrong with palmwood.nl?
I checked the size of the sites on the hosting server: no more than a few hundred MB’s. So it is only the size of the RW file on my Mac…
I have no idea why your project file is so big but it can definitely pose some problems. One problem … pretty hard to backup to your server (if you use the RW option to backup … which is a great feature).
There’s one way to discover a bit more about your files. But if you are not reasonably tech savvy then I’d suggest NOT doing what I suggest …
- make a copy of your RW project
- put it somewhere else on your hard drive
- right-click on your copied project and choose Show Package Contents (in reality a RW project is just a special kind of folder)
- now using your finder start to do some sleuthing. It is likely most of the “bigness” is inside the Pages subfolder. But in this case any of the subfolders could be much bigger than needed. I’d suggest viewing in Finder taking advantage of the Size column to order the various files
Whatever you find may not make complete sense to you. That’s fine. But report back on where the “bigness” seems to reside. I’m sure someone can help you at that point. But 10 Gb is unbelievably big. Something has gone amok.
3 Likes
1 Like
Your home page takes 20 seconds to load on my 15mbs speed broadband. That alone suggests that there is a content size issue?
@Ruyton can I ask what the program is that you are using to ascertain the size, load speed etc of @tonjenner website ?
Safari Developer panel. Right click on your page and choose ‘Inspect Element’ or use the Web inspector from the Safari menu.
1 Like
@tonjenner Check if your project file contains any externals.
Externals can transfer automatically between open projects and really inflate your project file size.
Thank you Gary Wann and Mathew Mitchell!
Indeed, the Package Contents revealed the problem: the Resources folder was more than 10 GB! What happened? Somewhere in the making of this website I saw that the Resources, obtained by Cmd 4 in edit mode of RW, contained a subfolder. I think I must have put a whole folder, in stead of one file from that folder, in the resources. I did delete this subfolder from the resources then, but evidently the Resources in the Package contents kept all those files… how come?
A few remarks:
- I have spend several hours in scrolling through the Resources from the Package Contents, to delete all unused files (lots of .wav files that shouldn’t be there…). Up till now this Resources folder is under 1 GB. Still big, I think. Maybe because:
- It seems to me that this folder contains a lot of duplicate files: how can this be? I don’t dare to delete any of these duplications, for I don’t know which one is used by the website.
- The resources that come up after Cmd 4 in RW edit mode, didn’t show all these files. It is probably something different than the Resources folder in the Package Contents. Is that correct? I don’t understand these differences.
- Gary, I have indeed some pictures that are a few MB’s; I will look at that. But I don’t think they will have much effect on the loading of the site. I will see the Safari Developer panel, where can I find this? Thanks!
- Carl Newlands: I don’t use externals as far as I know; thanks for the suggestion!
So, the overall question is: how is RW8 dealing with the resources?
See my post above regarding the Safari Developer panel - you may need to switch the option on in Safari preferences. Or right click on the live page in Safari and choose Inspect Element from the pop-up menu.
Something to bear in mind, RW does not delete ANYTHING from the hosting area, so any file you have uploaded using RW publishing or by FTP will remain on the server until you delete it manually using an FTP app such as Filezilla or Transmit.
Images sizes - they should ALWAYS be as small as is practical. Every kb affects the loading time of your page. Remember that there are those of use with disappointing download speeds, or poor 3G mobile signals.
Thanks again Gary!
Yes, I will listen to your advice and go through my websites and see which picture sizes can be made smaller. Another “administrational” job to do… 
Also thank you for explaining the way to the developer panel!
@tonjenner As a general rule of thumb you don’t want your images to be larger than 300k. Of course if you have 20 images each at 300k on one page there’s still a lot to download. Overly big images impact almost everyone, but especially people using their phones. And lots of folks use their phones for web stuff these days. There are a variety of tools that can help you manage image size. If nothing else you might want to consider using TinyPNG: https://tinypng.com
and perhaps the free web-based PS Express: https://photoshop.adobe.com/#
I don’t think you have a ton of images so just those 2 tools would help you. Your images typically don’t need to be any wider than 1400px and if I remember your pages correctly most of them could be much smaller in width. (I typically use 1400 or 1600 px for banners only).
As for MP3s … using them as resources in RW might be okay, but I tend to put all my materials directly to my server in a special folder then direct link those “things” (mp3, big zip files, etc.) to the relevant page in RW. It means I have a site with lots of media, but not a big RW project. My current course website is about 30 pages but the RW project is 12 Mb. Also with a smaller project you can take advantage of the RW feature to backup your project file to your server. And backups are always a good thing.
Thanks Mathew, that’s interesting. Like I said, I will go through my website pages and see what I can do with the pictures.
How do you directly link your big files to the pages on the hosting server?
Learning all the time…
@tonjenner It all depends on the stacks you are using. Links are the easiest. I use Transmit for uploading files. It has a nice copy URL function (but so do most FTP apps). I just copy the link, go back to my markdown editor or RW and create the link.
Images and audio may be trickier depending on the stack you are using. I think most audio stacks make this easy to do: especially the ones from Stacks4Stacks. But basically the audio stack will have an option to use a remote link: so you copy from FTP app and paste into relevant area in the stack.
Images are the trickiest: mainly because many image stacks only allow you to drag and drop images into the stack. However, over time a greater percentage of image stacks allow you to also use remote links. It really depends on the stacks you are using. If I remember correctly, your site does not use that many images (e.g. less than 12) so as long as you’ve optimized & resized your images this may not be a big issue.
Let us know about what stacks you are using for images (or perhaps not using currently but are at your disposal) and someone can let you know if the remote link option is possible.
Suggest the following:
Create a local export destination on your hard drive and export the entire site to that. Now it is easy to check the total size of that folder structure, and if it is big, then locate the reason. If it is not big, then you can delete the entire hosted content and re-export entire site to the server.
ps: I accept no responsibility if you screw up your site!
Once again thanks for all suggestions.
I think I have tackled the main issues and the site file is much much smaller now. That’s enough. Now I will spend my time to my music making. When a song is ready, I will add it to my site 
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.