Hey all. I’ve done my best to read up on warehousing files to help decrease my RW project and page sizes. I have one page on my site that links to a lot of publications (PDF files). Initially I had all of these as “Resources” in RW. As text on the page, I’d link the title of a publication directly to the RW resource. That made a huge file size, so I switched over to putting all the files directly on my host’s server. Now my page only uses external links to URLs for the warehoused PDFs. For whatever reason, speed tests still say the page is 100+ MB when it loads and it’s really slow. Did I miss something or misunderstand warehousing? Help! The page is at http://agwaguide.org/library/publications/
How big are your images? If they are large, that will not change or make anything faster by warehousing. It will just make your RW file smaller.
They vary a lot but they can get pretty large. Most are 1-5 MB but the biggest ones get into the 20 MB range. I thought that moving them onto the host server meant the page itself was smaller. If that’s not true, then I’m in trouble! The page has at least 30 PDFs linked.
I can’t figure out what you’re trying to do, nor can I fully see your linked page.
Linking to PDFs, no matter how large, should not be a problem. The person downloading may have to wait awhile, but the page itself should load VERY quickly.
There’s something very funky going on with that page. Can you describe how you set it up?
It almost seems like you are somehow embedding all the PDFs within that page, instead of providing simple links to them.
If you used Markdown a link would be like this:
[Zölch, T., Wamsler, C., & Pauleit, S. (2017). Integrating the ecosystem-based approach in municipal adaptation strategies to climate change. Journal of Cleaner Production. In Press, Accepted Manuscript. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.09.146](http://agwaguide.org/docs/Zolch_et_al_2017.pdf)
In essence each link should not add “weight” to your page.
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I couldn’t load the page all the way either… Mathew is right. But 20 MB is huge in general for an image on the web. Even 1mb is pretty large. I’m a photographer and my largest files are probably 500 kb.
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@Mathew, I agree that something funky is going on, but I can’t pin down what/why. The page is a list of scientific papers and reports. It loads alright but slowly for me in Chrome and stalls out when I try Safari. The page itself has the same header and footer partial as the other pages. The bulk is a list of PDF text documents. A few are large files in the case of a 200-page report or something similar. It’s done in Foundation and really it’s just a top bar menu, a couple headers, and a big Paragraph Pro stack that contains the text hyperlinks. I’ll try to recreate a new version of the page separately so I can see if I’ve made any big errors in RW.
In your case the size of the PDFs should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with how fast/slow the page loads. You should be creating links to the PDFs. Thus they are not loaded.
… on the other hand if you have somehow embedded PDFs on the page that’s a whole different story. You’ll want to do a quick switch to links.
Your page should be loading in less than a second. Thus something is really off.
I suppose a different issue is what you mean by warehousing and what I mean by warehousing are 2 very different things. In fact, that may be the problem. How did you warehouse? Did you manually upload them to a specific folder via Transmit or some other FTP app? I can see your PDFs are uploaded to AWAGUIDE.ORG/Docs but I’m not sure if “docs” is a page within RW or a complete separate folder (and that’s what it should be)
When I switched over to my attempt at warehousing, I manually uploaded all the files into a new folder within the file manager of my host (LittleOak) server – completely independent of RW publishing. “Docs” is not a page within my RW project. It’s only a place where I store the files. Then I get the URLs of the files and link to those. I think I’m doing it correctly but I’ve obviously screwed something up along the way! I appreciate the input.
Everything you write sounds fine.
Would you be willing to try an experiment? Try to create a link in markdown format. Create a new page (you can hide from navigation), put in a Markdown stack. Here’s how to create a list of links:
- 1st Article name & details. [Download here](fullURL here)
- 2nd Article name & details. [Download here](fullURL here)
Do this for 2 to 5 articles. See if the preview works fine. See if the published page works fine. Both should load very quickly. Whether it works or not, post your markdown links in this discussion. The way to do this is to “border” your code on the top and bottom with three ```. Then we can see what’s really going on.
There’s 2 basic scenarios:
- all your links are done incorrectly somehow
- one or a small number are incorrect or have a weird problem
Right now I can’t really tell which of the scenarios might be playing out in your case.
I’ve started out a test page and so far so good (http://agwaguide.org/library/pub-test/). Below is the text/code from the short sample in Markdown. Assuming this is alright, I’ll scrap the old page and re-publish using this approach:
Alodah, A. & Seidou, O. (2017). The realism of Stochastic Weather Generators in Risk Discovery. WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 220, 239-249. DOI: 10.2495/WRM170231 [(**Download here**)] (http://agwaguide.org/docs/Alodah-and-Seidou-2017.pdf)
Barbour, E.J., Holz, L., Kuczera, G., Pollino, C.A., Jakeman, A.J., & Loucks, D.P. (2016). Optimisation as a Process for Managing River Ecosystems. Environmental Modeling & Software, 83, 167-178. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21483.8528 [(**Download here**)] (http://agwaguide.org/docs/Barbour-2016.pdf)
BASE. (2015). Economic evaluation of adaptation options. http://base-adaptation.eu/sites/default/files/Deliverable_5_2_FINAL.pdf [(**Download here**)] (http://base-adaptation.eu/sites/default/files/Deliverable_5_2_FINAL.pdf)
All looks/works fine. I do have some stylistic suggestions: but that’s “style” and just ignore if you want.
- I’ve replaced “download” with “link” simply because the links open the PDF in a browser, but don’t download them. (If you have a special setup where PDFs truly are auto-downloaded then ignore this comment)
- I’ve created a list. This tends to look better. In this case I created an ordered list (numbered), but unordered would work as well.
- some other small things. Ignore or use as you want.
Here’s a link where you can see the results:
https://mathewusf.com/medialab2018/test/
BTW there’s a lot of other junk on that page. Just ignore.
And here’s the exact Markdown I used:
### References (updated version)
1. Alodah, A. & Seidou, O. (2017). The realism of Stochastic Weather Generators in Risk Discovery. WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 220, 239-249. DOI: 10.2495/WRM170231 [Link here] (http://agwaguide.org/docs/Alodah-and-Seidou-2017.pdf)
2. Barbour, E.J., Holz, L., Kuczera, G., Pollino, C.A., Jakeman, A.J., & Loucks, D.P. (2016). Optimisation as a Process for Managing River Ecosystems. Environmental Modeling & Software, 83, 167-178. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21483.8528 [Link here] (http://agwaguide.org/docs/Barbour-2016.pdf)
3. BASE. (2015). Economic evaluation of adaptation options. [Link here] (http://base-adaptation.eu/sites/default/files/Deliverable_5_2_FINAL.pdf)
I’m not sure what was happening before, but the main thing is you did successfully warehouse your PDFs!
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Mathew, you’re incredibly helpful! I’m not sure if I’ve fully resolved the issue but that’s likely due to some error on my side. Thanks for all the tips.
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