Archive for the 'performance' Category

A quick study of PDF optimization

Aug 17th, 2023

Couple days ago I found out about a tool called pdfcpu, a PDF processor. Among its features I saw “optimize” so I had to take it ot for a spin and see how much of an optimization we’re talking about. Here’s a quick study of optimizing a random-ish sample of PDF files. Source data I […]

 

Fixing INP with a VIEWPORT tag

Jul 12th, 2023

So I woke up yesterday being scolded by Google. An email from Google Search Console Team with subject “Core Web Vitals INP issues detected on your site”. Huh?! It was about this WordPress-powered site that you’re reading now (phpied.com). The Interaction to Next Paint metric (INP for short) was in the “Needs improvement” category as […]

 

A circle of web performance innovation

May 21st, 2023

Inspired by Harry Roberts’ research and work on ct.css and Vitaly Friedman’s Nordic.js 2022 presentation, Rick Viscomi hacked up a tool (a JS snippet) called capo.js that can do what Harry says. Next logical step is to test the results of the tool in a no-code experimental setting and see if the results make sense […]

 

Lighthouse diff + WebPageTest

May 9th, 2023

Lighthouse (LH), the performance auditing tool from Google now has a diff tool so you can compare what happens before/after a change or me vs competitor types. And WebPageTest.org (WPT), the industry-darling web perf analyzer, also runs Lighthouse and in addition to presenting the results (in two different ways, actually) you can export the results […]

 

Jehl’s Law of Web Performance

Apr 21st, 2023

Adam Fendrych reported that Scott Jehl said in his Web Expo talk that a website should load before you can say “Cumulative Layout Shift”. What does that mean in practice? We’re web performance specialists here, we work with measurements and numbers, so we need a more exact number. Numbers reduce ambiguity. To find out that […]

 

Quick BPP (image entropy) check

Apr 13th, 2023

Chrome is making a change on how Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) core web vital (CWV) is being calculated in order to avoid abuse. The abuse is that people cheat by putting a fake “hero” image (imagine a stretched out 1×1 transparent gif) and have this counted as a sooner LCP event. Chrome is fighting this […]

 

Faster WordPress rendering with 3 lines of configuration

Jul 2nd, 2022

“When I was younger, so much younger than today” and upset and full of vinegar about the state of the world, I’d say things like “CSS is the worst” (not really). Now, half a year later, older and wiser and more accepting, I’d agree to mellow down to “CSS is render-blocking”. Un-render-blocking CSS What this […]

 

Perfplanet calendar ’21 call for articles

Nov 26th, 2021

Helloooo, dear reader and web performance enthusiast! It’s time to sit down and write an article for the performance calendar. Here are some more details. Or if you’re not feeling like writing, look around you and recruit the person you think should share their knowledge with the world. What do you want to write about? […]

 

Perfplanet calendar’s oldies but goodies

Nov 3rd, 2021

Thomas Steiner has a brilliant idea for this year’s Perfplanet calendar edition: what if we revisit some of the best articles from the past. “Best” is subjective but how about “still popular”? So here’s a list of the 31 most visited articles in the past year in reverse chronological order of publication. (31 as the […]

 

This page loaded in X seconds

Mar 27th, 2018

I was just admiring Tim Kadlec eye-pleasing site. Nice, simple, see what I’m talkin’ ’bout. The feature I liked most was the footer that said “This page loaded in 0.186 seconds”. First of all – fast! Second – I thought all sites should have that. And what better way than an on-demand bookmarklet you carry […]

 

Performance calendar ’17 call to all

Nov 11th, 2017

Helloooo! It’s time to sit down and write an article for the performance calendar. You have until Nov 30 to send me your piece. Details. What do you want to write about? Some ideas: Hello, 2007 called! Do I still shard domains to load resources from? Do I still package all JS in one big […]

 

Font Fiddling

Sep 27th, 2017

I’ve been trying to stay away from webfonts as much as I can. IMO they are not worth the performance complications. Font loaders, FOUT, yadda-yadda. But… it happens. Story time While showing off another one of my music theory exercises to my prof, he mentioned it would be nice to be able to tell v […]

 

Quick stats on html/js/css sizes

Jun 27th, 2017

I’m sure better tools exist, but hey, quick and dirty is faster: running a quick console thing to tell me what makes the HTML payload bigger

 

Performance Calendar call for participation

Nov 1st, 2016

TL;DR: Please start writing and finish before Dec 1st. Amazingly http://calendar.perfplanet.com has been up for 7 years straight now, helping spread the word about web performance and helping the developers do their best to provide fast and pleasurable experiences. Every year people from all walks of development life come to the calendar where an article […]

 

Beacon performance

Feb 9th, 2014

Beacons are small requests that our apps make to report some information “home”, to the server. Beacons are often used to report visitor stats, JS errors, performance metrics. Beacons often don’t return any data back to the client, but some do. Example use <div id="app">Awesome app is awesome</div> <script> // gather data somehow var data […]

 

NYC.bind(me)

Sep 22nd, 2013

On my way to NYC for Edge conference and NYC Web perf meetup. Some slides and RSVP links inside.

 

Remarkable React

Aug 26th, 2013

I gave a talk about React at BrazilJS few days ago. The “slides” are here. In this post I’ll go over what I said (more or less) at the beginning of the presentation. I hope to follow up with some more code. Disclaimer: I work at Facebook. But these are my thoughts. In fact, I […]

 

Here’s to a faster Recommendations plugin

May 5th, 2013

So I’ve been part of the quest of making all Facebook social plugins faster, even if it means rewriting them from scratch. After the Send plugin, Like button (perf optimizations described here), Follow plugin, Facepile and Likebox (perf details here), now you have a faster Recommendations plugin. The techniques used to make it faster are […]

 

CSS animations off the UI thread

Mar 12th, 2013

This excellent Google I/O talk mentions that Chrome for Android moves the CSS animations off of the UI thread, which is, of course, a great idea. Playing around with it, here’s what I found: Browser support: Desktop Safari, iOS Safari, Android Chrome. You need to use CSS transforms. Animating regular properties doesn’t work. Update: (see […]

 

C3PO: Common 3rd-party objects

Feb 18th, 2013

Problem: too much JavaScript in your page to handle 3rd party widgets (e.g. Like buttons) Possible solution: a common piece of JavaScript to handle all third parties’ needs What JavaScript? If you’ve read the previous post, you see that the most features in a third party widget are possible only if you inject JavaScript from […]

 

Speed geek’s guide to Facebook buttons

Feb 14th, 2013

or “How to help your users share your content on Facebook and not hurt performance” Facebook’s like button is much much faster now than it used to be. It also uses much fewer resources. And lazy-evaluates JavaScript on demand. And so on. But it’s still not the only option when it comes to putting a […]

 

Run jsperf tests in a bunch of WebPagetest browsers

Feb 11th, 2013

Motivation 1. You write a new test to confirm a JavaScript-related performance speculation 2. You click 3. Your test runs in a bunch of browsers Glossary JSperf.com is the site where all you JavaScript performance guesswork should go to die or be confirmed. You know how the old wise people say “JSperf URL or it […]

 

webkit css-on-demand issues

Feb 11th, 2013

This post brought to you via Facebook engineers Jeff Morrison and Andrey Sukhachev, who discovered and helped isolate the issue. Use case Think a “single page app” use case. You click a button. Content comes via XHR. But content is complex (and app is as lazy-loading as possible) and content requires extra CSS. In an […]

 

Digging into the HTTP archive #2

Dec 28th, 2012

Continuing from earlier tonight, let’s see how you can use the HTTP archive as a starting point and continue examining the Internet at large. Task: figure out what % of the JPEGs out there on the web today are progressive vs baseline. Ann Robson has an article for the perfplanet calendar later tonight with all […]

 

Digging into the HTTP archive

Dec 28th, 2012

Update: Second part One way to do web performance research is to dig into what’s out there. It’s a tradition dating back from Steve Souders and his HPWS where he was looking at the top 10 Alexa sites for proof that best practices are or aren’t followed. This involves loading each pages and inspecting the […]