I’m back from my combined business and hiking trip out west, visiting the Velocity 2011 Web Performance Conference in Santa Clara, California. The second part of my trip was devoted to hiking and photography in the great Northwest, which we won’t review here. This year’s Velocity was bigger and better and yes, sold out again. Here are some highlights.
CSS optimization
Page Speed Online – web-based performance tool based on Page Speed Browser Extension
Page Speed Online is a web-based version of the Page Speed plugin, that allows developers to analyze web pages without the need of downloading an extension. Page Speed Online also features a mobile page analysis, which lets developers analyze their mobile sites like they are viewed in a mobile browser, with mobile-specific optimization recommendations. This article shows the new free service in action.
Serving 2012 Olympic Tickets: London2012 15, CoSport 0 – olympic website performance
The race is on to get tickets to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England. Millions of people (some 2.3 to 2.7 million signed up to request tickets so far) are clamoring to attend events featuring the likes of Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, and Usain Bolt. To distribute the load in the initial ticket request phase, Olympic organizers are using a batch system to accept requests over a six week period. Even with this even-handed approach, the servers were under tremendous load in the early hours of this past Tuesday. We investigate and show how performance could be improved.
Automatically Speed Up Your Site with mod_pagespeed for Apache
mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache 2.2+ module designed to automatically speed up your site by optimizing the various components of your web pages. The module does this by rewriting page resources using filters that adhere to web performance best practices. mod_pagespeed is the server version of the client-side Firefox module that analyzes web pages using similar best practices.
Velocity 2010 Web Performance Conference
I just got back from the Velocity 2010 Web Performance and Operations Conference in Santa Clara, California. Now in its third year, the conference is a must-see if you are a web performance or network operations engineer. And engineers were aplenty this year, the conference was sold out with more than 1500 attendees.
Anatomy of a Redesign
WebsiteOptimization.com was designed by the author in 2002, in the age of slower dial-up modems. The design was starting to show its age, so we’ve been quietly working on a redesign to improve the look and conversion rate. This article shows how we redesigned the site, and some of the techniques we used to achieve our goals.
Web Page Performance Thesis – web page response time measurement, modeling and monitoring
For his doctoral thesis at the University of Glasgow, Thiam Kian Chiew studied web page performance. As part of his research, Chiew explored the different factors that affect web page speed, testing and modeling the key components to web page download times. His findings are summarized below.
O’Reilly Books on Web Performance
There are a number of books published now on Web Performance. Here is a summary of the books available on the topic, mainly from O’Reilly.
Inline Images with Data URLs – embed graphics inline with data uri scheme
Inline images use the data URI scheme to embed images directly within web pages. As defined by RFC 2397, data URIs are designed to embed small data items as “immediate” data, as if they were referenced externally. Using inline images saves HTTP requests over externally referenced objects.
Suture CSS or JavaScript Files to Reduce HTTP Requests
A server-side variation of merging CSS and JavaScript files before uploading to the server is to do this digital suturing at the server. You can “suture” CSS or JavaScript files together before delivery from the server to save HTTP requests. Often developers create separate style sheets and scripts for organizational purposes, and import them into their pages as needed. There are two problems with this approach: