Archive for October, 2008

JavaScript Optimization Techniques Today

Monday, October 27th, 2008

The wild popularity of Ajax fueled widespread usage of JavaScript. Almost every web 2.0 application relies on JavaScript to deliver front end interactivity. A growing list of JavaScript libraries (over 200+) are being created by various Ajax developers, some of which have gathered significant community adoption. Though the usage of ...

Yahoo’s Performance Rules

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Yahoo’s Performance team summarized their experience in web performance optimization into 14 rules in general (Reference 4, http://stevesouders.com/examples/rules.php): 1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests 2. Use a Content Delivery Network 3. Add an Expires Header 4. Gzip Components 5. Put Stylesheets at the Top 6. Put Scripts at the Bottom 7. Avoid CSS Expressions 8. Make JavaScript and CSS External 9. Reduce DNS Lookups 10. Minify JavaScript 11. Avoid Redirects 12. Remove Duplicate Scripts 13. Configure ETags 14. Make ...

Front End Performance and Today’s Typical Web Sites

Monday, October 27th, 2008

In order to understand how the front end, especially JavaScript, is impacting web performance today, some typical web pages were studied. The following table shows content composition of the front pages of two representative web sites, American Airline (www.aa.com) and FaceBook (www.facebook.com): Table 1: Content Composition of Selected Web Sites aa.com ...

Web Peformance Factors

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Every web application requires satisfactory performance in order to be functional. Every web application has its own context that different factors influence performance differently. Since the beginning of the web, there have been many performance tuning endeavors responding to what the context calls for. A good metric to gauge web performance ...