On Thursday, as the world was looking to the internet for information about Michael Jackson, the internet came to a crawl. The initial assumption was that news sites simply weren’t equipped to handle the spike in traffic that such an event would cause. Even Google News flagged the surge as an automated attack. According to [...]
Posts Tagged ‘performance’
Faster websites – Improving User Experience
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009At Google I/O (Google’s developer conference), Steve Souders (the creator of YSlow) presented a few ideas for making websites even faster.
When it comes to optimizing a website for speed and user experience, there’s only so much you can do from the backend. The most room for performance improvement is in client-side frontend. Anywhere between 80 [...]
PHP performance and caching
Friday, August 8th, 2008Here’s a link interesting presentation on how Facebook tunes its application performance (PHP):
http://sizzo.org/wp/talks (download any of the Facebook Performance Tuning PDFs)
If your site has enough traffic to need any of these techniques you can use Facebook as a model.
One especially interesting piece is APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which caches the compiled PHP opcode so that [...]
Design sites for dial-up?
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Stop and guess: what percent of internet users are still on dial-up? Ok, continue. Highlights below are from the Alertbox usability newsletter…
WEB PAGES GETTING FATTER
Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:
(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB:
a growth rate of 82%/year.
(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed [...]
Javascript Performance Tester
Friday, March 14th, 2008I went to a Web 2.0 performance tuning session at SD West and the presenter showed off a page he created to shows some differences and non-differences between the different ways of doing things in Javascript — function calling, DOM access, array access, loop constructs. Read the summary at the top of the page [...]
Cache settings in IE
Sunday, September 16th, 2007This article explains why the Every visit to the page and Automatically don’t have dramatic differences.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb250442.aspx#ie_introfiddler2_topic4
Essentially, if the cache copy is fresh (based on the “Expires” set in the header) no request is issued by the browser. Only when the cache is stale or no cache-directives are present do you [...]
