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I'd never heard anyone use the
verb "to tax" in casual conversation until I started talking to
engineers about server pushes. "No, you shouldn't do it," they'd say,
shaking their heads in concern. "It taxes the server."
And indeed it does. For starters, server-push images aren't
compressed (animated GIFs are), and because they're run by a CGI script,
they can't be cached; every time a user returns to the page or hits
Reload, the server has to push out the images all over again (animated
GIFs can be served from the cache).
Server pushes are powered by a CGI script that makes the server send
a string of pages as though they were one big document. Normally, a
server is free to simultaneously process many requests from many
clients, but the server push forces it to focus its attention, leaving a
single connection wide open for a single client while it loads and runs
the CGI script, finds and grabs the images on the server, and pushes the
entire series out - sort of like holding your breath while giving birth
to a baby (blush). I'm sure you can think of other analogies.
"Well," you might say, "I don't particularly care if the server is
having a hard day or not - I just want my graphics to look cool." And
at first glance you might think there are compelling reasons to use
server pushes instead of animated GIFs: they're supported by more
browsers than animated GIFs, and the stream of server-push graphics usually doesn't
"hiccup" the way animated GIFs do.
Are animated
GIFs the
way to go?
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In reality, though, server pushes are more hassle than they're worth:
They are extremely taxing on servers, you need to know CGI
scripting (or someone who does) to make them work, and you'll need to
bribe the engineers who run your server in order to implement them. In
fact, if your homepage is at a university or on an Internet service
provider, forget server pushes altogether; you probably don't have
access to run a CGI script anyway.
If you ask me, animated GIFs are the way to go. They're cleaner, more
efficient, and easier to implement. With GifBuilder, a simple
freeware program, you can quickly assemble animated GIFs without any
special server access or knowledge of CGI scripting.
GifBuilder's easy to learn and offers pretty good image compression.
Eight 10K frames result in an animated GIF much smaller than 80K, and
if you isolate only the changing parts of the image, you can make it
even smaller. Unfortunately, the program itself often gets a little
moody, but that's a subject for another day....
Have fun.
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