Even Faster Web Sites in Skiathos
Ioannis Cherouvim, a software engineer from Greece, sent me this photo:
He took Even Faster Web Sites with him on his vacation to Skiathos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. In his email, Ioannis mentioned that applying the tips from my previous book to the newspaper web site Eleftherotypia (“free press” in Greek) saved “10GB traffic per day which really made a difference in our datacenter bill.” In addition, the users of the site got a better user experience.
Improved web performance and views of the Aegean Sea from the shores of a Greek island – now that’s heaven. Thanks, Ioannis – you made my day!
Doloto: JavaScript download optimizer
One of the speakers at Velocity 2008 was Ben Livshits from Microsoft Research. He spoke about Doloto, a system for splitting up huge JavaScript payloads for better performance. I talk about Doloto in Even Faster Web Sites. When I wrote the book, Doloto was an internal project, but that all changed last week when Microsoft Research released Doloto to the public.
The project web site describes Doloto as:
…an AJAX application optimization tool, especially useful for large and complex Web 2.0 applications that contain a lot of code, such as Bing Maps, Hotmail, etc. Doloto analyzes AJAX application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications. After being processed by Doloto, an application will initially transfer only the portion of code necessary for application initialization.
Anyone who has tried to do code analysis on JavaScript (a la Caja) knows this is a complex problem. But it’s worth the effort:
In our experiments across a number of AJAX applications and network conditions, Doloto reduced the amount of initial downloaded JavaScript code by over 40%, or hundreds of kilobytes resulting in startup often faster by 30-40%, depending on network conditions.
Hats off to Ben and the rest of the Doloto team at Microsoft Research on the release of Doloto. This and other tools are sorely needed to help with some of the heavy lifting that now sits solely on the shoulders of web developers.