2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 15 This article is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Today’s article is a contribution from Ara Pehlivanian, author of two JavaScript books. Please welcome Ara and stay tuned for the articles to come. Ara Pehlivanian has been working on the Web […]
Free-falling waterfalls
Dec 14th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 14 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the articles to come. In this serias of performance posts, so far we’ve looked at having fewer components in the waterfall (meaning less HTTP requests) and also making the […]
Give PNG a chance
Dec 13th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 13 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the articles to come. People are often afraid to use PNG because they think that: a/ it doesn’t work in all browsers, or b/ filesizes are bigger than GIF […]
Big list of image optimization tools
Dec 12th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 12 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment (12 articles down, 12 more to go). Stay tuned for the articles to come. Let’s continue the topic of reducing file sizes started with the previous post and talk about making images […]
Reducing the payload: compression, minification, 204s
Dec 11th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 11 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. After removing all the extra HTTP requests you possibly can from your waterfall, it’s time to make sure that those that are left are as small […]
Caching vs. inlining
Dec 10th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 10 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. Looking back at the life of Page 2.0. and all the opportunities for optimization, the posts I’ve put up so far as part of this advent […]
Duplicates and near-duplicates
Dec 9th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 9 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. One of Yahoo!’s first batch of performance best practices has always been “Avoid duplicate scripts” (check Steve Souders’ post). Later we added “… and styles”. This […]
Collecting web data with a faster, free server
Dec 8th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 8 This article is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. This is also the first ever guest post to this blog. Please welcome the world-famous Christian Heilmann! And stay tuned for the next articles. Chris Heilmann is a self confessed data junkie […]
Data URIs, MHTML and IE7/Win7/Vista blues
Dec 7th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 7 This is the seventh in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. UPDATE: While this post is an interesting study, the problem it solves turns out to be much simpler. […]
The pain points of having fewer components
Dec 6th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 6 This is the sixth in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. Last night I talked about the benefits of reducing the number of page components and the resulting elimination […]
Reducing the number of page components
Dec 5th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 5 This is the fifth in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. Let’s talk a but about waterfall optimization – the first thing that happens in Mr.Page’s life. The best […]
Psychology of performance
Dec 4th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 4 This is the fourth in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. Measuring time is an important activity in your performance efforts. After all, how else would you know if […]
Required reading
Dec 3rd, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 3 This is the third in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. There’s a number of performance rules and best practices that every web developer should know. Some of them […]
Performance tools
Dec 2nd, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 2 This is the second in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. While theoretically you can speed up your site by just blindly following advice from this blog and other […]
The performance roadmap
Dec 1st, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 1 This is the first in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. As you’ve probably heard (and maybe all too often), we live in Web 2.0. This may mean different […]
Performance Advent Calendar 2009
Nov 30th, 20092010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved I like 24ways.org’s idea of a webdev advent calendar – publishing one article per day from Dec 1st to Dec 24. I thought it would be cool to have the same thing on web performance topics. Our young performance community would benefit from a year-end […]
Statsy – more data points for markup quality
Nov 30th, 2009In the spirit of the content-to-markup ratio bookmarklet, here’s another one that gives you some more data points to help you judge the quality of a page’s markup and help answer the old question – where does all this page weight go. Install the statsy bookmarklet Drag this link to your bookmarks: statsy the results […]
@font-face gzipping – take II
Oct 20th, 2009Since my previous post on @font-face and gzipping, Paul Irish has asked (and so has @KLTF) what about WOFF? WOFF is a newer format with built in compression and ability to store meta data. So I took this stnf2woff utility and converted all the TTF and OTF files from my previous tests to WOFF. Below […]
Gzip your @font-face files
Oct 10th, 2009Adding custom fancy fonts to a web page seems to be all the rage these days. Looking at some examples with Net panel on, I saw some of those font files are 100K which is a pretty big price to pay for an ornament like this. I mean you can build whole pages, with fancy […]
“Don’t make me wait” – slides from my eBay tech talk
Aug 19th, 2009Here are the slides from a tech talk I gave at eBay last week, I called it “Don’t make me wait! or how to build high-performance web apps”, inspired by, you guessed it, the excellent book “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug. There’s some intimate details on YSlow’s scoring algo towards the end and […]
Slides from JSConf
Apr 28th, 2009I’m back from the most excellent JSConf (JavaScript Conference) in Washington D.C. I’m tired and need sleep but the conference was, hands down, the best conference I’ve ever attended. It was all about the community, it was inexpensive, with parties all around, both speakers and attendees were treated exceptionally well, in fact there wasn’t a […]
MHTML – when you need data: URIs in IE7 and under
Apr 10th, 2009UPDATE: It’s very important to have a closing separator in the MHTML document, otherwise there are known issues in IE7 on Vista or Windows 7. The details are here. In the previous post I described what data: URIs are and how they are useful to reduce the number of HTTP requests. Now, the problem with […]
data:urls – what are they and how to use them
Apr 10th, 2009If you follow this blog you already know the infamous website performance rule #1 – reduce the number of HTTP requests. Actually, to celebrate Earth Day and to jump the “go-green” wagon/jargon, my favourite performance mantra as of late is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” (the Recycle part is a wee fuzzy but, oh well) So to […]
204 No Content
Mar 8th, 2009Sometimes you want to send an HTTP request and you don’t care about the response. This is often used for logging stuff on the server. Usually you request a 1×1 pixel GIF file and send a bunch of query parameters. E.g. htp://example.org/blank.gif?user=stoyan&browser=msie&creditcard=123JUSTKIDDING567 Such 1×1 gifs are often called “web bugs” or “beacons” and sometimes used […]
The 5 Laws of the Website Anything
Mar 4th, 2009Via Eric Goldsmith, I found today this nice Web Performance 101 article, where the author, Alberto Savoia, states Top Four Laws of Web Site Performance. The article is as old as 2001 (heh, back then “website”, being a relatively newer concept was spelled “web site” 😉 ) and the topic is performance, but the “laws” […]