Your local area cable provider has been putting the concept of On-Demand to good use for years, providing television or movie titles only when specifically requested by the user. There are just too many titles out there to run them all simultaneously. The most popular and current titles are made available via traditional television channels and are always displayed on the guide.

This concept also carries over to web content. With any given page load, we could query every possible piece of relevant content from our various data sources (web files, database, external, etc), and display it all at once. But, this reveals two major problems. First, it would place an unreasonable load on our servers with each request. Second, it would overwhelm the user with the large amount of information that is spit out onto the page.

To solve the second problem, we use expand/collapse features or tabbed pages, made possible with the use of JavaScript. But, the information is still being loaded, tapping resources that might never be of interest to the user.

The first step to resolving this problem is knowing which pages are resource intensive.

Once you have this knowledge, it's a matter of stepping through each page, and determining where you can "cut back".

There are three basic approaches: