Hi guys,
one thing that is special about Meteotemplate and not used by the other major weather website templates is the use of database. This obviously has many advantages, many of the statistics and graphs shown by Meteotemplate would never be possible in the other ones, on the other hand, just like anything, this has its pros and cons. In this case, the advantage of having very detailed statistics and data goes against loading time. If you want a simple, very fast loading page, then Meteotemplate is not for you. If you want a detailed analysis of your data, which in some cases can take a while to calculate, then Meteotemplate is the template for you.
However, that said, it still does not mean things cannot be improved. Even though it will never be as fast as a template which just shows current conditions loaded from a text file, rather than doing some advanced calculations, some optimization is surely possible. One thing to also keep in mind is that Meteotemplate is how I learned PHP and programming in general and so some of the pages written at the beginning, still being used, are miles, no sorry… light years away from perfect 😀
One good example would be the recently released precipitation analysis. This plugin uses the database and calculates everything in real-time just like any of the other scripts, still, it loads much faster so to certain extent, I am sure other pages would also be possible to optimize (though I want to emphasize the phrase “to a certain extent”. In some cases it really isn’t possible to calculate and display the data in a matter of 1-2 seconds).
My server is relatively fast so to me all pages currently seem to load in a reasonable time and it is hard to tell, which particular page is potentially problematic – and that is exactly the point of this post. If you want to help me out again and make Meteotemplate better for everyone, go to your page, do some testing and then use the comments section below this post to tell me which pages in particular seem to be problematic. I will then look at the ones mentioned most often and see/post about whether I think it could be possible to speed things up a little bit and then try to implement these changes in the next version of Meteotemplate if possible.
Thanks!