For the last month I’ve been seeing the following on an increasingly frequent basis:

For the lead up to Christmas, and to coincide with Madman’s various sales and promotions, this error page is seen more often than not. At least by me. When I see this I tend to get visions of a lone server sitting in a drab room in a Collingwood office building, quietly struggling to keep up with the number of connections and serve out hundreds of pages, images, scripts and, now, high-quality streaming video.

I think one thing has been made painfully obvious at this point, and it’s something that should have been learned during the 10th Anniversary Sale: Madman need to upgrade their web service! I mean, really, there are ways to deal with higher than normal loads and they don’t need to be terribly expensive.

Optimise the web application.

This should be the first port of call. I’m thinking that the number of database queries should be minimised, output size should be reduced, Java code optimisations should be researched, caching should be implemented and generally have the whole thing given a thorough going over.

Break up the processing responsibilities.

Since the site runs on Java I’m going to assume they’re running a Tomcat server. I hope this same server is not used for serving static content like images – the Apache HTTP Server is a much better fit for that. At the same time, it’s probably best to use a few servers to perform load balancing and to allow the database server(s) to run on different hardware to the web server(s). This should ensure that no one place is placed under too much load.

Use a Content Delivery Network

This would probably result in the most drastic improvement for the least amount of work. Using a CDN like Amazon S3 or Akamai would allow all the static content (and there’s a lot of it) to be served from servers that are designed to handle almost any load and bandwidth requirements. I’m thinking the streaming trailers would benefit the most from being moved to a CDN, if they’re not on one already. On top of the benefit of reducing bandwidth needs and the number of active connections required to the Madman server, Akamai and possibly others provide services to increase the availability of web applications (”Web Application Acceleration”) – particularly Java-based ones. I can’t say how well these would work here and whether they’d be necessary once other optimisations are performed but it’s definitely something to look into.

Well, I think that about sums it up. A few things that could be done, the last being quite simple, to improve the availability of the Madman site and ensure potential customers get turned into actual customers and the raving fans are placated with their anime crack.

As I mentioned before, Sony and Nintendo were doing most of the marketing – they each had large areas assigned to them and were showing off at least a dozen games each as well as their respective consoles and handhelds. Sony in particular went to great effort to put their games on large, 1080p HDTV screens to maximise the eye candy of the PS3. Nintendo, on the other hand, seemed content to let the games do the talking for them (Super Mario Galaxy had queues of people lining up to play). Microsoft had a huge inflated Master Chief helmet but they weren’t really showing off much in the way of games, only Halo 3 and Mass Effect running on a couple small screens. One of the interesting things is that, because you have both consoles makers and games publishers at the same event, it’s sometimes confusing as to who is responsible for what. For instance, Yamaha had an area and were using a Wii to show off their surround sound systems but from a distance is almost looked like another Nintendo booth.

The games of the day for me were Crysis, Heavenly Sword and Assassin’s Creed. Crysis looks gorgeous but mostly the same in terms of gameplay (no surprise there). Heavenly Sword I had to describe to someone as an “ocular orgasm” because it just looks that good. The gameplay did look a bit tame but I think the visuals alone would justify a purchase if it cost about $75 (it doesn’t unfortunately). Assassin’s Creed was, I think, the darling of the expo as I believe I saw it in three different places: running on both Xbox 360s and PS3s. I couldn’t really tell much of a difference between the two versions, but at one point it looked like the Xbox version didn’t have shadows turned on. Weird. The game seems to be similar, gameplay-wise, to Thief or Splinter Cell but the graphics are very “next-gen” and it actually manages to convey a living world, filled with people. Most parts of the game I saw had at least 20 people on screen at any one time in narrow city streets.

Super Mario Galaxy had a lot of people excited about it and the crowd around the three TVs running it were larger than most. I’m still trying to work out how exactly it’s played as there seems to be an odd two-player setup where two people control a single Mario. It does look like great fun though and the playing area is huge and seemingly allows for complete non-linear exploration.

There were a few competitions set up with Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament 3 and so on. Some even had commentators. I’m not really into those sort of multiplayer games so I watched for a few minutes and moved on.

The main stage had different events running throughout the weekend but I never ended up checking any out. It looked like the usual sort of stuff though: panels, presentations and competitions. I think there was even a cosplay competition on at one point – obviously an attempt to try and maximise the audience for the expo. Unsurprisingly, the cosplay competition had what I think was the most number of people watching it.

Speaking of all things anime, Madman Entertainment had a booth in the middle of the convention hall. I ended up spending an obscene amount of money updating my anime and manga collections. I worked it out and I ended up saving roughly $60 by buying the stuff there instead of online or in a store. From now on I should try to do all my shopping at conventions!

One of the highlights of the expo was seeing tons of people walking around in some shirts from the Swinburne gamers club. Basically the shirt was red, with a send up of the OFLC’s R18+ logo, instead having the text beside it: “This rating not suitable for mature adults.” This is an old issue but still one that I think baffles a lot of people – why does Australia not have an R rating for games? All the other ratings have been brought into line with the movie ratings but for some bizarre reason the OFLC has refused to allow 18+ games to be sold (legally) in Australia. A sea of bright red shirts was a welcome sign of passive protest.

Something that didn’t surprise me but I still found interesting was the presence of a toned down version of “booth babes”. Basically, half the booths there had at least one, but usually several, hot women dressed in revealing clothes (hot pants, low-cut tops) to draw attention. What I found hilarious was at one booth where a bunch of guys were sitting around ogling Assassin’s Creed running on a 102 inch Panasonic TV – the two girls wandering around weren’t even getting a glance! I must admit, I only looked once myself before turning back to the game. Since I’m sure some women will be reading this, rest assured that they also had (what I assume to be) hot guys wearing tight t-shirts. I can’t comment too much on this though as I wasn’t really paying attention to them.

So overall, I think the event was a success. There were plenty of people there and everyone looked like they were having a blast (sometimes literally, in a virtual sense). I definitely had fun and came away with a ton of swag so I’m happy, even though I didn’t actually spend more than a few hours there on Friday and Saturday. Did any readers end up attending? I’d like to hear what other people thought about it.

Rather than go into a long and involved review of the plot, characters and culture of the show I’d like to cover the local release by Madman Entertainment. For a proper review of the material itself you can check out Anime New Network’s review or, as usual, the Wikipedia.

The first thing to cover, if only to get it out of the way, is the episode ordering on the discs. I’ve discussed my feelings this previously and while I still fell the show works better when it’s not in the correct order, I find now that I’ve largely gotten over the whole thing. Watching the DVD you’re still introduced to the series with Episode 00 The Adventures of Mikaru Asahina, which is the same episode used to introduce the broadcast ordering. After that I wasn’t terribly put out watching the series in chronological order. Really, the only thing you miss is the increased sense of wackiness the show exudes when nothing is where it should be and the hilarious episode previews by Kyon and Haruhi (Yuki introduces them now in her typical monotone).

The quality of the video and audio is great, as you would expect. I’ve been a bit put out by anime DVDs in the past when it turned out that the video quality on the DVD was actually lower than the quality of the fansubs I’d downloaded. This is definitely not the case here: Melancholy has some of the highest productions values of any anime in recent years and Madman would have had to be insane (har har) to treat such an overwhelming fan favourite with anything less than their utmost respect. As I have ranted about before, I do wish that interlacing would be removed before the video hits the DVD but that’s about the only complaint I can level at it. If your DVD player does a decent job of deinterlacing you won’t even notice anything.

If you’ve previously seen a fansubbed version of Melancholy then chances are you’re going to want to listen to the Japanese dub again on the DVD, of which only Dolby 2.0 is provided, simply because that’s what you’ll be most used to. I would urge you to have a listen to the English dub though as it really is quite good. Crispin Freeman does a fantastic job of capturing Kyon’s tone; you have only to listen to the work he does in Episode 00 to understand what I mean. The only voice that is still irking me is Johnny Yong Bosch’s performance as Itsuki Koizumi. I don’t have any particular reason for this except that his voice is quite distinctive and he sounds too much like he does in his other anime roles (Ichigo in Bleach, Vash in Trigun, etc). I’m sure I’ll get used to it as the show continues.

There are quite a few extras on the disc, including the usual assortment of textless opening and closing, TV commericlas and Madman trailers which here are Highlander: Search For Vengeance, Afro Samurai, .hack//Roots, Ah! My Goddess – Season 2, Hellsing Ultimate – Volume 1 (which nicely shows off Crispin Freeman’s Alucard) and Karas. Also included are a couple “Making Of” clips and three episodes of “The Adventures of ASOS Brigade” which, from my brief glance, seemed to be worth a few chuckles.

In typical Madman style they’ve provided you with the usual cover, featuring the hideous OFLC rating logos, and an alternative cover which is lacking them. I think I prefer the normal cover because I like the picture of Haruhi dragging Kyon around by his tie but you can decide for yourselves.

On the topic of OFLC ratings I have to wonder if an MA15+ is really warranted in this case. Sure, the show does contain contain sexual themes (I think Mikaru gets put in some compromising position in every episode) but I don’t think this really goes beyond an M15+ rating at worst. The only thing I can think of is that it’s due to the allusion in one episode to Haruhi spreading around that the computer club president sexually assaulted Mikaru. The weird thing is, nothing like the word “rape” is ever heard since it’s actually bleeped out. So why such a strong rating? Especially for an animated title. Oh well, the things classification boards come up with these days.

I think the timing of this DVD release was quite inspired: it came out only days before Manifest so most of the otaku in the state (and even interstate) would have been in a particularly purchase-happy mood. I must admit that this is one of the first DVDs I’ve bought of an anime series that wasn’t in a complete boxset. I guess the temptation of a special bonus DVD with the episodes in broadcast order for simply too much for me to resist! If you’re planning on buying Melancholy in the near future keep in mind that the bonus DVD voucher is only in the collector’s box version and does not come with the DVD by itself.

Well, I think I’ve covered everything about the local release. I don’t think I need mention that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is one of my all time favourite shows (anime or otherwise) and is highly recommended. It makes me hope that Madman will pick up the light novels for local distribution!

Incidently, if you want to grab a copy for yourself online you find Volume 1 and Volume 1 & Collector’s Box on the Madman website, as well as Volume 2 available for pre-order.

If I left anything out or you’d like to know something further please leave a comment.

I’ll start off by stating that I am operating mainly from the output of YSlow and somewhat on my own observations and knowledge. I did this because I want to concentrate on things which should be a bit more obvious and more easily “fixable” than something which requires an in-depth understanding of obscure web development topics. Besides, I don’t have access to their back-end system so I can only make general assumptions on anything except things sent to the browser. I believe the Madman site runs on a Java platform (because of a page of Java exceptions I got one day) so much of my PHP-based knowledge won’t be applicable and I might have some misunderstandings about how things work. If so I apologise in advance.

Markup

It’s great that they tried to use true XHTML, complete with XML declaration, but if you’re going to go down this route then at least check that the markup validates!

The site also appears to use some non-standard attributes. I don’t know why this is the case but seeing as they’re not as dramatic as a supposed XML not passing a basic XML check I’m not going to worry too much about them.

Remove Commented Out Code

Really? Using HTML comments to remove markup from processing? May I suggest using Java comments instead? Or a version control system if you want to have access to previously written, but no longer needed, code?

Remove Excess Whitespace

This actually helps the first suggestion as well, seeing as the presence of whitespace before the XML declaration is one of the reasons the markup doesn’t validate. If you look at the source you can clearly see gaping holes, which is filled with newlines and tabs.

For example, there is 81 bytes of whitespace between the text “Add to Basket” and the enclosing anchor tag. Every time. Is this really necessary?

As an experiment, I went through one of the HTML files and removed a bunch of the whitespace manually. Nothing drastic – just the big chunks of glaring space that I found. (I also removed the unnecessary commented out HTML and JavaScript I mentioned above.) I managed to eliminate 5K off the original 34K size. When gzip compressed (at -9), as would be done for HTTP transfer my “cleaned” version resulted in a filesize of 5.3K, compared to the original’s size of 6.1K. A 13% saving on every page is certainly nothing to sneeze at for a site which has a large amount of traffic (I assume).

I understand the likely reason for this: when the code is seen in the template it is nicely formatted and so looks nice to the site developer. Who really cares about the code sent to the browser? It’s not like people look at it anyway, right? (cough) Well, the two reasons to remove at least some of the whitespace are to allow the page to validate at the most basic level and to shave off some excess flab from page transfers.

Use Compression

The actual HTML is sent compressed, which is good, but none of the secondary files are. CSS and JavaScript are sent “raw”, which isn’t great when the basic CSS files are 21K all up and the JavaScript in the member area is a mind-blowing 152K spread across 8 files (they use Google Analytics as well but Google nicely sends that code compressed).

Compressing all the JavaScript files results in a total of 37.3K to download – less than the size of the prorotype.js file before it has been compressed! If all those files are combined before being compressed then an extra 3K is shaved off, leaving us with a 34.2K download, along with fewer HTTP requests to make to get it. This can be done with something like Ed Eliot’s combine script, which is written in PHP but I’m sure the idea can be easily adapted to Java, if not the code itself.

Similarly, compressing the CSS files individually results in a total of 4.8K and combining them results in 4.4K sent to the browser.

Overall, this gives a saving of over 130K, just by using HTTP compression! Of course, this is only relevant for situations where the cache is empty but, at least according to Yahoo!, this is roughly half of the time. The Madman site doesn’t use “far future” expires headers either so aggressive caching by the browser is not possible.

Minify JavaScript

This continues on from above. One thing you will notice in the newest version of the combine script is that it runs JavaScript files through JSMin before compressing them and sending them to the browser. What kind of savings would this give us?

I won’t list the uncompressed results (see the table below) but the compressed size is 27.5K individually and 25.1K merged. Holy freakin’ crap! This is roughly a 10K saving, even after gzip compression.

Of course, seeing as these files are served from the Madman server(s) there’s no reason why a more advanced compressor can’t be used. I chose Julien Lecomte’s new YUI Compressor, which is currently at version 2.0, for this task. It should be noted that YUI-Compressor is slow and can’t be used for on-the-fly compression like JSMin but this shouldn’t be a problem as the compression can be done beforehand, whenever the JavaScript files are modified.

I’m sure you just want the numbers now, huh? When compressed: 25.8K individually and 23.1K combined. An improvement of 2K on top of JSMin and 128K over the original JavaScript files. Wow. And all with so little effort!

Here’s a summary of the results for individual Javascript:

And here’s a summary of the differences between using individual files and merged files:

As you might expect, merging files together does nothing when compression (rather than minification) is out of the picture. However, it is clear that running minifcation programs over the JavaScript files results in a very real saving on file size.

More YSlow Suggestions

1. Make fewer HTTP requests. There are plenty of CSS background images which might be able to be combined into a CSS sprite. For JavaScript/CSS files a combining script like I linked to above would do the trick.
2. Add an expires header. None of the external files have a far future expires header. Using these can be a bit dangerous if you don’t set up the system properly to deal with changes to files (ie. the browser will get newer versions).

Minor Changes

I’d ditch the images in the footer, which are used in place of text. I doubt if many people read that far and, if they do, I doubt they’re going to be bothered if the text isn’t exactly as the designer wanted. While the images are minuscule, they still require 3 unnecessary HTTP requests. Personally I think the image-text is too blurry anyway. Similarly, I think the search image-text in the header can be replaced with actual text.

I think someone needs to check the log out button:

This could just be an issue with Firefox on Linux but, even so, it’s really annoying.

Conclusion

I did focus more on performance issues than I would have liked but, then again, the responsiveness of a site directly affects the usability. For example, who wants to wait around for 150K of JavaScript files to download when, with a few small changes, they could be downloading 23K?

Most of these things should be pretty easy to fix/improve and I’ve tried to provide suggestions for how to do so. I have other suggestions for improvements but they’re significantly larger and more ambitious undertakings.

Overall, I think incremental improvements to a site are definitely the way to go. Madman have been using this kind of approach in their site updates and have started embracing RIA-like functionality, such as in-place editing, helped by cutting edge libraries like Prototype/Script.aculo.us. I hope these trends continue into the future.

This brings us to the Australian release. According to the current information, volume 1 will be available by itself and as part of an “ULTRA SUPER LIMITED EDITON” which will have the volume 1 DVD, an armband, and a special redemption voucher. Like the American and Japanese releases, the Australian release will be in chronological order. However, volumes 2, 3 and 4 will also have vouchers and once you have all 4 you can redeem them for Volume 5, which will have the series in TV broadcast order on a two DVDs (that’s 7 episodes on each disc).

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. I do like that there’s a possibility of having both forms of the series in the one boxset but it makes me question why they’d stretch out the series across twice as many discs as necessary. OK, this isn’t limited to this series: the anime average of 3 episodes per disc has always baffled me. I also don’t like the idea of being forced into the more expensive route of buying individual discs of a limited edition if I want to have the series in it’s “proper” order. Madman is a company which seems to really care about making its customers happy (angry otaku are not something you ever want to deal with) so I’m wondering what other sorts of things they’ve got cooking for this release. I almost started drooling after seeing some of the extravaganzas that were the special edition Region 1 DVD boxes. Times will tell if the local release is just as exciting. Considering the huge fanbase for the show, and a large number of guaranteed sales, I think Madman will be willing to splash out a bit more than usual.