High Scalability
Scaling a site or app is a tricky topic to tackle. There’s no shortage of technologies out there to increase performance, spread load, distribute databases and so forth; the difficulty is choosing from the sheer volume of options and permutations.
Just Make It Faster
As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.” As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.” Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?”
Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache
Webmaster Level: All
Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier — ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.
So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:
Read more on Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache…
Mobile Browser Cache Limits: Android, iOS, and webOS
In early 2008, Wayne Shea and Tenni Theurer wrote a YUI Blog post on iPhone Cacheability in which they shared the results of research into various characteristics and limitations of Mobile Safari’s cache in iPhone OS 1.x. Among other things, they found that individual components larger than 25KB were not cached, and that there was a maximum total cache size of between 475KB and 500KB.
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Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer
After reading a recent post by Steve Souders concerning a free tool called dynaTrace Ajax, I was intrigued. It claimed to provide full tracing analysis of Internet Explorer 6-8 (including JavaScript, rendering, and network traffic). Giving it a try I was very impressed. I tested against a few web sites but got the most interesting results running against the JavaScript-heavy Gmail in Internet Explorer 8.
Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed!
This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance. You may be wondering why you’re reading a performance article on the YUI Blog. It turns out that most of web page performance is affected by front-end engineering, that is, the user interface design and development.
Read more on Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed!…