Performance Improvements of Screencast.com

The latest Screencast.com release included a couple speed improvements that were quietly included.

URL improvements

The first improvement was one requested by Kyle Mulka, of Twilk, during a visit to TechSmith. Kyle mentioned that he wished the Screencast.com short URLs would stay short after the web page was accessed. He mentioned that a lot of users like to copy and paste the URL from the address bar and use it in tweets.

I spent a bit of time researching what we would have to change to fix this issue, and in a couple of days we had the changes implemented.

This change also brings about a nice speed improvement to the loading of pages on Screencast.com. Previously, when a piece of content was visited, the server would reply with an HTTP Status Code 302 - Found. This causes the browser to then load the page at the redirected location. This little bit of communication takes time, and with our new change we have removed this initial hurdle.

Here is a graphic showing the change in loading times:

With this improvement, we have increased the speed of viewing your Screencast.com content by 4.1% on average. If you are viewing your content from outside of North America, you can expect an even larger speedup.

Reduced page size

The second improvement that was added to Screencast.com was a new library layout. Much care has been taken to reduce the filesize of the webpages, to the point where loading up my library using the Library (beta) only uses 1/4 of the bytes yet sends more data. The Library (beta) also makes 11 less network requests than the current library. This means that your Screencast.com library is now more accessible under tighter network conditions such as 3G.