High Performance Web Sites blog

This week I co-chaired Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly. It was great! Jesse and I told the story about how the conference came about. When we proposed the conference we believed there was a community of performance and operations engineers that needed a forum to share and learn, and the attendance at Velocity confirmed this. Velocity sold out with over 600 attendees!

The lineup of speakers was great. There was a lot of material packed in a 2-day conference. I stayed in the Performance track, but wanted to attend every session in the Operations track, too. Many speakers shared their slides, and there are videos and photos from some of the talks.

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A lot of blogging and follow-up discussion ensued with the announcement that IE8 supports six connections per host. The blogs I saw:

• IE8: The Performance Implications
• IE8 speeds things up
• IE8: 6 Connections Per Host
• IE 8 and Performance
• Testing IE8.s Connection Parallelism
• IE 8 Connection Parallelism Issues

It’s likely that Firefox 3 will support 6 connections per server in an upcoming beta release, which means more discussion is expected. I wanted to pull all the facts into one place and make several points that I think are important and interesting. Specifically I talk about:

• the HTTP/1.1 RFC
• settings for current browsers
• upperbound of open connections (cool!)
• effect of proxies
• will this break the Internet?

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IE8 Beta 1 has several performance improvements listed in the release notes. Many of these improvements center around the DOM and JavaScript execution. And their announcement about stricter standards compliance is a great move forward. There are three changes that are big and relate to my performance best practices: 6 downloads per hostname, loading scripts in parallel (the biggest improvement!), and support for data: URIs.

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