Will drag down site

author acknowledges in one of the many threads here that quick chat can indeed slow down a site specially if it’s in the sidebar and you got tons of visitors looking at it at the same time.

I love this plugin, but darn it, the entire site loads at about 25% of speed compared to when the plugin is not activated. I’m afraid such slow site loading is scaring away lots of potential visitors. I have a separate chat room for each blog entry. Would things speed up if all of the blog entries shared the same default chat room? Is there anything else I can do to optimize Quick Chat so that it doesn’t drag the site to a crawl?

My host doesn’t even allow chat scripts. I am using the free chatango now without issue. It’s off site served.

One apparent improvement was to give all of the different chat rooms the same name in the parameter settings. When each different page had its own chat room, that appeared to be too much for the plugin to handle. For example: [quick-chat height=”300″ room=”default” userlist=”1″ userlist_position=”left” smilies=”1″ send_button=”0″ loggedin_visible=”1″ guests_visible=”1″ avatars=”1″ counter=”1″] Here, each room is named “default”. The site performance, including administration, is still noticably degraded, but at lest I have a chat room. Now, all visitors on the site are in the same chat room. Since it’s not a really busy site, that’s OK.