Steve Souders of Yahoo's "Exceptional Performance Team" gave an insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues. Unfortunately I didn't get to see it in person but the Web 2.0 talks have just been put up and the ppt is fascinating and absolutely a must-read for anyone involved in web products.
His work has been serialized on the Yahoo user interface blog, and will also be published in an upcoming O'Reilly title (est publish date: Sep 07).
We have so much of this wrong at topix now that it makes me want to cry but you can bet I've already emailed this ppt to my eng team. :) Even if you're pure mgmt or product marketing you need to be aware of these issues and how they directly affect user experience. We've seen a direct correlation between site speed and traffic.
This is a big presentation, with a lot of data in it (a whole book's worth apparently), but half way through he boils it down into 14 rules for faster front end performance:
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- Use a CDN
- Add an Expires header
- Gzip components
- Put CSS at the top
- Move JS to the bottom
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Make JS and CSS external
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Minify JS
- Avoid redirects
- Remove duplicate scripts
- Turn off ETags
- Make AJAX cacheable and small
The full talk has details on what all of these mean in practice. The final slide of the deck is a set of references and resources, which I've pulled out here for clickability:
book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514211/
examples: http://stevesouders.com/examples/
image maps: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.6
CSS sprites: http://alistapart.com/articles/sprites
inline images: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397
jsmin: http://crockford.com/javascript/jsmin
dojo compressor: http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/shrinksafe
HTTP status codes: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html
IBM Page Detailer: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/pagedetailer
Fasterfox: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/
LiveHTTPHeaders: http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/
Firebug: http://getfirebug.com/
YUIBlog: http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/11/28/performance-research-part-1/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part-3/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/04/11/performance-research-part-4/
YDN: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/03/high_performanc.html
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/04/rule_1_make_few.html
No comments:
Post a Comment