Archives
The Art of Capacity Planning
This week I opened a beautiful package from O’Reilly. It contained John Allspaw’s new book, The Art of Capacity Planning. As you can see, the cover is a delight to look at. But you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover! Luckily, what’s inside the book is also a delight. Now, let me make a […]
Runtime Page Optimizer
The Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO) is an exciting product from Aptimize. RPO runs on a web server applying performance optimizations to pages at runtime, just before the page is sent to the browser. RPO automatically implements many of the best practices from my book and YSlow, so the guys from Aptimize contacted me and showed […]
Say “no” to IE6
IE6 is a pain. It’s slow. It doesn’t behave well. Things that work in other browsers break in IE6. Hours and hours of web developer time is spent just making things work in IE6. Why do web developers spend so much time just to make IE6 work? Because a large percentage of users (22%, 25%, […]
Firefox 3.1: raising the bar
Last month I released UA Profiler – tests that automatically measure the performance characteristics of browsers. The thing I really like about this tool is that the web community generates the data. Anyone can point their browser at the site and run the tests. So far 1000+ people have run 2000+ tests on 100 different […]
Hammerhead: moving performance testing upstream
Today at The Ajax Experience, I released Hammerhead, a Firebug extension for measuring page load times. Improving performance starts with metrics. How long does it take for the page to load? Seems like a simple question to answer, but gathering accurate measurements can be a challenge. In my experience, performance metrics exist at four stages […]
Ugly Doll at the Ajax Experience
My six year old daughter snuck her purple hippo in my bag when I went to SXSW in February. It provided a way for us to stay in touch even with time zone differences and busy schedules. I would take pictures of the purple hippo with my iPhone and email them back home. She and […]
First Week of Classes
I finished my first week teaching CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford. It went well. The class is settling in at 35 students plus another 10 watching remotely through the Stanford Center for Professional Development. It’s 2/3 undergrad, 1/3 grad. The students are smart and ask great questions. I’ve laid out the class schedule […]
CS193H: High Performance Web Sites
This week I start teaching CS193H, “High Performance Web Sites”, at Stanford. I’ve evangelized fast web pages at conferences and tech companies, most recently Twitter and LinkedIn. Teaching at the university level is a natural progression in evangelizing what I’ve learned (and continue to learn) about web performance. I’ve always thought the format of my […]
“Delayed Script Execution” in Opera
I’ve recently been evangelizing techniques for loading external scripts without blocking the rest of the page. A co-worker at Google pointed out a little known option in Opera: Delayed Script Execution. Opera’s support web site provides this explanation: Primarily for low bandwidth devices, not well-tested on desktop. Ignore script tags until entire document is parsed […]
UA Profiler and Google Chrome
The night before it launched, I sat down to analyze Google Chrome from a performance perspective – what good performance traits did it have and which ones was it missing? I couldn’t get to the internal download links and had to resign myself to waiting for the official launch the next day. Or did I? […]
SXSW: get out the vote
I submitted a proposal for SXSW Interactive: Even Faster Web Sites. SXSW is in Austin, March 13-17, 2009. It’s a great conference with a wide variety of content. John Resig recently announced two talk proposals. Both look great. In the same way, I hope to add a bit more technical content to the conference. I […]
Revving Filenames: don’t use querystring
It’s important to make resources (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) cacheable so your pages load faster when users come back. A recent study from Website Optimization shows that the top 1000 home pages average over 50 resources per page! Being able to skip 50 HTTP requests and just read those resources from the browser’s cache dramatically […]
Firebug Working Group meeting
This week I hosted the Firebug Working Group meeting at Google. The goal of the Firebug Working Group is to provide an organization for the many volunteers contributing to the Firebug project. Now that Mozilla is dedicating resources to Firebug, I have great hopes that Firebug development will continue at a quicker pace. All three […]
OSCON: 34 hours in 37 minutes
I was in Portland for OSCON last week. There were many talks that attracted my attention – so many that I couldn’t get to them all. If you missed some talks, or didn’t make it to OSCON, check out this great effort capturing Oscon in 37 minutes. Gregg Pollack asked 45 speakers to summarize their […]
Firebug Lite 1.2 Released
Today Firebug Lite 1.2 was released. This new version was built by Azer Koçulu, creator of pi.debugger. Azer joined the Firebug Working Group, morphed the GUI to look like Firebug, and added it to the Firebug code base. Firebug Lite is a subset of Firebug that can be used in IE, Opera, and Safari. The […]
See You at OSCON
I’ll be up at OSCON in Portland this week. I’m speaking Thursday 2:35pm on Even Faster Web Sites, the next set of performance best practices I’m working on. I’m signing books Thursday 12:20pm at the Powells table, and I’ll be in the Google booth Thursday 4pm. At the Google booth I’ll be doing performance consulting […]
YUI’s Combo Handler CDN Service
Eric Miraglia wrote a post yesterday called Combo Handler Service Available for Yahoo-hosted JS. One of the advantages of YUI over other JavaScript frameworks is its à la carte capabilities. Developers can choose just the parts they want, rather than being saddled with the whole kit and caboodle. It’s great to download fewer bytes, but […]
Women are Geeks (too!)
As a father of three girls I watch for indicators of the level to which women are represented in the tech community. I decided to write a blog post about this while sitting at the ACM Awards Banquet a week ago. My experience coming from tech companies, including Yahoo! and Google, is that women are […]
Velocity Wrap-up
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 […]
Velocity Product Launch: KITE 2.0
A few product launches are being announced at Velocity. I was able to get an early look at KITE 2.0 from Keynote. I’ve worked with Keynote for years. They have a strong platform of services for measuring web site availability and performance. KITE, Keynote’s Internet Testing Environment, is the customer tool for creating test scripts. […]