Is there any way to create a button for an unglorified version of Skritter? I'm using an older computer and it can get pretty slow, I could live without small things such as strokes snapping into place, colors vibrating, etc. It's not that I don't like them by Skritter takes up a lot of my comp's resources which is unbelievably sad:(

Most of the stuff that slows you down isn't the flashy stuff (or we wouldn't use it). The heavy processing tends to happen when switching prompts and loading and adding words.

What browser are you on? That can make a big difference to your speed. For example, IE will execute much slower JavaScript, so when it builds the prompts, it will be slower. Firefox 3 currently has a garbage collection issue that causes stutters as often as every several seconds. Haven't tried too much in Safari, but it should be fast. Chrome is fast. Google Chrome Frame (running in IE) should be fast. Old versions of browsers should be really slow.

To help see what's slowing you down, you can press Ctrl+Alt+F to see a framerate display. When the framerate drops below 40 fps, things get choppy. What kind of framerates do you see while writing (not while switching prompts)?

Fair enough, that makes sense.

I'm on firefox 3 and it does stutter quite often, if I don't write or anything I get a steady 40 fps, when I start writing or finish the character it fluctuates between 10-30(for both). I didn't have as many stuttering issues with the old practice page as with the new(but I do prefer the new one). Is there any way to fix the garbage collection issue? I'll try Chrome out later

There might be ways to decrease JavaScript allocation we're doing to mitigate the amount of garbage collection that needs to happen; I'm not sure. We will try. Hopefully there's something we can do besides fixing the bug in Firefox ourselves and waiting for the released versions of Firefox to catch up:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504640

Please do try Chrome. But if it drops FPS that much now, it'll take a lot of optimization to get it running smoothly even in Chrome. Alas!

well it's not your guys fault, i just have a slow computer

Last time someone mentioned Chrome, I went to check on it, but beta for Mac wasn't available. Just got notification that it's up now, so went to try it out, and wow, what a difference. I've been using Firefox all along. Now I get ahead of myself and I'm moving too fast before I think. What fun.

I'm finding the whole site is responding really slow tonight. Is it just my computer? It's been quite frustrating trying to practise.

I haven't noticed any slow down practicing (been practicing Japanese since I blogged). Though I did check out the server status; it seems to have been a little iffy today...

http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/2009/12/11#ae-trust-detail-datastore-get-latency

Has your internet been at all slow in general today?

No, other sites have been loading as normal.

Our average server response times have been solid all day, so I don't think it was slow for most. Huh. Next time it's slow, please try going to http://skrit.appspot.com/ (an alternate version of the site) and compare to see if it's any faster. Let us know what you find.

I've been mauling all day on Firefox's garbage collection stuttering, and I've made some optimizations that should improve things. Taylor04, please let me know if the average speed in Firefox has gone up at all.

There is a vast improvement in speed on Firefox, thank you so much Nick!

Yes! That is very gratifying to hear.