Archives
Sharding Dominant Domains
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]
Positioning Inline Scripts
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]
Web Exponents
I’m fortunate to have gotten to know so many tech gurus over the last few years from speaking at conferences and co-chairing Velocity. As if programming wasn’t complex enough, there are all the choices that have to be made with regard to language, design, performance, scalability, tools, deployment, and more. It’s incredibly valuable to hear […]
Loading Scripts Without Blocking
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]
Even Faster Web Sites
This post introduces Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS Selectors. Last April, I blogged […]
don’t use @import
In Chapter 5 of High Performance Web Sites, I briefly mention that @import has a negative impact on web page performance. I dug into this deeper for my talk at Web 2.0 Expo, creating several test pages and HTTP waterfall charts, all shown below. The bottomline is: use LINK instead of @import if you want […]
Performance Impact of CSS Selectors
A few months back there were some posts about the performance impact of inefficient CSS selectors. I was intrigued – this is the kind of browser idiosyncratic behavior that I live for. On further investigation, I’m not so sure that it’s worth the time to make CSS selectors more efficient. I’ll go even farther and […]
O’Reilly Master Class
O’Reilly, my publisher, has launched a new initiative to bring a deeper level of information and engagement around their titles and technology focus areas. I’m excited to be a part of this by leading a one day workshop on Creating Higher Performance Web Sites. The workshop (or “Master Class” as they call it) is March […]
Fronteers 2009
I’m psyched to be speaking at Fronteers in November – and not just because it’s one of the best conference names ever. And not just because it’s in Amsterdam – although that is a huge plus. The main reason I’m psyched is because I missed last year’s conference and regretted it. The feedback I got […]
John Resig: Drop-in JavaScript Performance
I wrote a post on the Google Code Blog about John Resig’s tech talk “Drop-in JavaScript Performance.” The video and slides are now available. In this talk, John starts off highlighting why performance will improve in the next generation of browsers, thanks to advances in JavaScript engines and new features such as process per tab […]
User Agents in the morning
Every working day, a script runs at 7am that opens ~20 websites in my browser. I open them at 7am so that they’re ready for me when I sit down with my coffee. I’m the performance guy – I can’t stand waiting for a page to load. Among the sites that I read everyday are blogs (Ajaxian, O’Reilly Radar, […]
CS193H video preview
My class at Stanford, CS193H High Performance Web Sites, was videotaped. Stanford does this so that people enrolled through the Stanford Center for Professional Development, who work fulltime, can watch the class at offhours. SCPD also makes some of the class videos available to the public. I’m currently talking with SCPD about releasing my videos, […]
Coupling asynchronous scripts
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]
(sharing) OLPC XO
For Christmas, I bought a XO laptop through the One Laptop Per Child program for two of my girls to share. (The irony of getting a One Laptop Per Child XO for the two of them to share just hit me ;-) My oldest daughter has her own MacBook, so I wanted a low priced […]
UA Profiler improvements
UA Profiler is the tool I released 3 months ago that tracks the performance traits of various browsers. It’s a community-driven project – as more people use it, the data has more coverage and accuracy. So far, 7000 people have run 10,000 tests across 150 different browser versions (2500 unique User Agents). Over the past […]
State of Performance 2008
My Stanford class, CS193H High Performance Web Sites, ended last week. The last lecture was called “State of Performance”. This was my review of what happened in 2008 with regard to web performance, and my predictions and hopes for what we’ll see in 2009. You can see the slides (ppt, GDoc), but I wanted to […]
CS193H: final exam
This past quarter I’ve been teaching CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford. Last week was the final exam and tonight I finished submitting the grades. (The average grade was 88.) This was a great experience. Stanford is an inspirational place to be. The students are very smart – one of the undergraduates in my […]
CACM article: High Performance Web Sites
Last summer I attended the ACM Awards Banquet. (I talked about this in my blog post about how Women are Geeks (too!).) Out of that came a request for me to write an article on web performance. The article is called “High Performance Web Sites”. [gasp!] It’s a review of the rules from my first […]
Velocity 2009: Call for Participation
Velocity 2009 is officially open! This is the conference that Jesse Robbins and I co-chair. Velocity 2009 is scheduled for June 22-24 at the Fairmont in San Jose. Checkout the new site. Most importantly, submit your speaking proposals on the Call for Participation page. We’ve provided some suggested topics. My favorites: How to tie web […]