Archives

HTTP Archive New Leadership

April 12, 2017 8:01 am | Comments Off on HTTP Archive New Leadership

I announced the HTTP Archive six years ago. Six years ago! It has exceeded my expectations and its value continues to grow. In order to expand the vision, I’ve asked Ilya Grigorik, Rick Viscomi, and Pat Meenan to take over leadership of the project. The HTTP Archive is part of the Internet Archive. The code […]

Velocity Farewell

November 9, 2016 5:45 am | 5 Comments

Velocity Origin Story In 2007, my first book, High Performance Web Sites, was selling very well. That, plus the launch of YSlow, brought more attention to web performance. As a result, Jon Jenkins invited me to give a tech talk at Amazon. Afterward, he, John Rauser, and I, plus a few other performance-minded folk, had a […]

HTTP Archive switches to Chrome

May 23, 2016 9:08 am | 7 Comments

The HTTP Archive crawls the world’s top URLs twice each month and records detailed information like the number of HTTP requests, the most popular image formats, and the use of gzip compression. In addition to aggregate stats, the HTTP Archive has the same data for individual websites plus images and video of the site loading. […]

Critical Metric: Critical Resources

February 10, 2016 7:37 pm | 6 Comments

A big change in the World of Performance for 2015 [this post is being cross-posted from the 2015 Performance Calendar] is the shift to metrics that do a better job of measuring the user experience. The performance industry grew up focusing on page load time, but teams with more advanced websites have started replacing PLT […]

HTTP Archive: past and future

October 12, 2015 4:19 am | 6 Comments

Background The HTTP Archive crawls the world’s top 500K URLs twice each month and records detailed information like the number of HTTP requests, the most popular image formats, and the use of gzip compression. We also crawl the top 5K URLs on real iPhones as part of the HTTP Archive Mobile. In addition to aggregate […]

domInteractive: is it? really?

August 7, 2015 10:50 am | 7 Comments

Netflix published a great article, Making Netflix.com Faster, about their move to Node.js. The article mentions how they use performance.timing.domInteractive to measure improvements: In order to test and understand the impact of our choices, we monitor a metric we call time to interactive (tti). Amount of time spent between first known startup of the application platform and […]

Hero Image Custom Metrics

May 12, 2015 1:31 am | 25 Comments

The takeaways from this post are: If your website has a hero image, make sure it loads and renders as early as possible. Many designs that feature a hero image suffer from HID (Hero Image Delay) mostly due to blocking scripts and stylesheets. You should add custom metrics to your website to make sure you […]

Joining SpeedCurve

March 23, 2015 11:46 am | 8 Comments

I’m excited to announce that I’m joining SpeedCurve! SpeedCurve provides insight into the interaction between performance and design to help companies deliver fast and engaging user experiences. I’ll be joining Mark Zeman, who launched the company in 2013. We make a great team. I’ve been working on web performance since 2002. Mark has a strong design […]

SERIOUS CONFUSION with Resource Timing

November 25, 2014 1:20 pm | 13 Comments

or “Duration includes Blocking” Resource Timing is a great way to measure how quickly resources download. Unfortunately, almost everyone I’ve spoken with does this using the “duration” attribute and are not aware that “duration” includes blocking time. As a result, “duration” time values are (much) greater than the actual download time, giving developers unexpected results. This issue […]

Request Timeout

November 14, 2014 3:15 am | 2 Comments

With the increase in 3rd party content on websites, I’ve evangelized heavily about how Frontend SPOF blocks the page from rendering. This is timely given the recent Doubleclick outage. Although I’ve been warning about Frontend SPOF for years, I’ve never measured how long a hung response blocks rendering. I used to think this depended on the browser, […]

do u webview?

October 9, 2014 3:52 am | 2 Comments

A “webview” is a browser bundled inside of a mobile application producing what is called a hybrid app. Using a webview allows mobile apps to be built using Web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) but still package it as a native app and put it in the app store. In addition to allowing devs to […]

Onload in Onload

September 12, 2014 7:58 am | 6 Comments

or “Why you should use document.readyState” I asked several web devs what happens if an onload handler adds another onload handler. Does the second onload handler execute? The onload event has already fired, so it might be too late for the second onload to get triggered. On the other hand, the onload phase isn’t over […]

Resource Timing practical tips

August 21, 2014 12:45 am | 9 Comments

The W3C Web Performance Working Group brought us Navigation Timing in 2012 and it’s now available in nearly every major browser. Navigation Timing defines a JavaScript API for measuring the performance of the main page. For example: // Navigation Timing var t = performance.timing, pageloadtime = t.loadEventStart – t.navigationStart, dns = t.domainLookupEnd – t.domainLookupStart, tcp = t.connectEnd – […]

Velocity highlights (video bonus!)

July 28, 2014 11:08 pm | Comments Off on Velocity highlights (video bonus!)

We’re in the quiet period between Velocity Santa Clara and Velocity New York. It’s a good time to look back at what we saw and look forward to what we’ll see this September 15-17 in NYC. Velocity Santa Clara was our biggest show to date. There was more activity across the attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors […]

HTTP Archive – new stuff!

June 8, 2014 10:11 pm | 8 Comments

Background The HTTP Archive crawls the world’s top 300K URLs twice each month and records detailed information like the number of HTTP requests, the most popular image formats, and the use of gzip compression. We also crawl the top 5K URLs on real iPhones as part of the HTTP Archive Mobile. In addition to aggregate stats, […]

MySQL dumps

May 8, 2014 9:19 pm | 2 Comments

As part of the HTTP Archive project, I create MySQL dumps for each crawl (on the 1st and 15th of each month). You can access the list of dumps from the downloads page. Several people use these dumps, most notably Ilya Grigorik who imports the data into Google BigQuery. For the last year I’ve hesitated […]

Unexpected prerender in Chrome

April 30, 2014 2:55 pm | 12 Comments

Over the last week I’ve been investigating the cacheability of resources from Shopify. I would visit the page every few hours and track the number of 200 OK versus 304 Not Modified responses. To my surprise, Chrome’s Network tab indicated that almost all the responses were “from cache”. This didn’t make sense. In many cases the […]

fast, faster, Fastly

March 10, 2014 10:56 am | 16 Comments

Today I join Fastly as Chief Performance Officer. Read more in Fastly’s announcement. I’m excited to get back to the world of startups. People who have known me for less than 15 years don’t know that side of me. In my early career I worked at Advanced Decision Systems, Helix Systems (co-founder), General Magic, WhoWhere?, and […]

Measuring localStorage Performance

February 11, 2014 4:59 pm | 3 Comments

Recently someone asked me if it was possible to measure the performance of localStorage. While this was difficult a few years ago, we can do it now thanks to Navigation Timing. This post explains how to measure localStorage performance as well as the results of my tests showing the maximum size of localStorage, when the […]

Browser Wishlist 2013

January 22, 2014 11:34 am | 1 Comment

This is a cross-post from last month’s Performance Calendar (hence the reference to “holiday” spirit). In case any browser teams are awash in the spirit of holiday gift-giving, here’s my wishlist for performance features I’d love to see. I did a similar Browser Performance Wishlist in 2010. I hope this list will initiate numerous discussions that result […]