[Stuart]

I am responsible for a web site at work. This site relies on a seperate web service to get data.

One page of this due to the way it had to work generated a lot of calls (in excess of 100) to the service, which slowed the page load down to about 12-15 seconds. Not too bad, but too slow for my liking (and it caused a couple of complaints).

I did raise this with the man who maintained the web service (as for security, I have no access to the source code, so cannot change it). He said it was as fast as it could be. He left, and the first thing the new guy did was analyse what the page was doing, and wrote a new function absorbing as much of that functionality into the webservice as possible.

Using the new function, the page loads in between 1.9 and 2 seconds.