Caching of panoramas in a Virtual Tour

[nmendes]

Mostly I use FPP for displaying Virtual Tours of properties, so there is a lot of hotspots that connect house rooms so the user can navigate freely. The problem is that the Browser doesn't seem to cache (store in memory) the loaded panoramas, and every time the user goes back to one visited room, it loads the same panorama again (and more waiting is necessary).
My guess is that there's no way I can cache the panoramas (they are big to use in fullscreen) inside the browser's cache.
Anyone using some creative approaches to this problem?

[jaaaab]

Hi

Normaly FPP puts the loaded panoramas in cache.

Did you checked your browser options? isn't it set to "nocache"?

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[nmendes]

Jaaaab: I'm using Firefox "out of the box", with no tweaking of the settings, with full support for caching. But everytime I click on a hotspot that leads to a panorama that I've already loaded before, it still loads as it was a fresh one. With 2mb panos in a house with 10+ rooms it's really overkill.

[WideEyes]

Hi nmendes

Perhaps you can find some answers in this thread ( http://www.flashpanoramas.com/forum/showthread.php?t=527 ) about preloading panoramas.

Just a thought

Best regards
Morten

[nmendes]

WideEyes: Thank you for the reply. I guess we're kinda stuck. The preloading of images does not seem to work, at least in my tests. It seems that Flash Player doesn't use the browser's cache?

[jaaaab]

hi nmendes

does this behaviour happen also when you look at panoramas from other sites?

then it comes from Firefox.... are you sure there's no added toolbars like Web Developper?

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[HansNyberg]

1. Are you using movies or cubefaces?

2. Have you forgot to remove the loaderBandwidth = 50 parameter
This will make the panorama load at 50kps every time even when cached.

Also at least on Mac, Firefox is a very slow browser and always take a couple of seconds to load large files.
You will see your loadingtext or glassmeter while it does.

Safari is much faster and you will just see a short blink from the glassmeter

Hans

[nmendes]

Jaaaab: Yes, the same happens with other panorama tours from other sites.
I'm using the Web Developer extension, but I'm not disabling the cache in there or somewhere else. The cache works well in regular files like html or images.

[Scott Witte]

Are you certain the images aren't being cached? Or are you just noticing that with every pano the loadmeter shows and you assume that means it is downloading again?

Denis told me that in v2.1 he built a 2 second delay into the loadmeter display (well, glassmeter for sure) but removed it in v2.2. The result is that every pano load, even from cache, displays the loadmeter. The only way to be sure is with a download monitor that shows what your real download activity is. I use Bandwidth Monitor Pro on the PC.

Oh! If you are viewing your tour locally with your files on your hard drive it is no different than the file being in cache. So, if your problem happens for you locally, with all your files on your own computer, then it isn't a cache issue.

[nmendes]

Scott: As HansNyberg correctly mentioned, this is a behaviour that happens in Firefox (both Mac and Win), I've tried with Safari and IE and the panoramas are correctly cached. The glassmeter appears but only for a sec or two. I guess this is a Firefox/FPP issue, or even a Firefox/Flash issue.

Are you certain the images aren't being cached? Or are you just noticing that with every pano the loadmeter shows and you assume that means it is downloading again?

[Scott Witte]

Scott: As HansNyberg correctly mentioned, this is a behavior that happens in Firefox (both Mac and Win)
I primarily use Firefox on PC and I can say with certainty that it caches my panoramas. I know this because when a reload a recent panorama It loads immediately and I see no network activity. I can also say with certainty that, in my case, Safari on PC does NOT cache panoramas.

While Quicktime has a setting to prevent caching of files, FPP doesn't, so it must follow the caching rules set up in the browser. Could you try this if you haven't already: Go to Tools / Options / Advanced / Network Tab. How much space is allocated to the cache? If it is too small then loading one large panorama will simply flush out the previous one from cache. Try increasing the cache to something like 50MB and see if that takes care of your problem.

[apinstein]

I was experiencing this same thing... no cache in FF, works fine in Safari. So I disabled my add-ons (firebug, yslow) and restarted, and the caching worked!

Then I re-enabled them one-by-one to find the culprit, but caching continued to work, unfortunately. So I don't have an exact answer other than FF seems buggy in this department.

Try disabling/restarting/re-enabling your addons and see if that fixes the problem.... maybe we can narrow it down.