Archives
Making the HTTP Archive faster
This week I finally got time to do some coding on the HTTP Archive. Coincidentally (ironically?) I needed to focus on performance. Hah! This turned out to be a good story with a few takeaways – info about the HTTP Archive, some MySQL optimizations, and a lesson learned about dynamic script loaders. Setting the stage […]
Radio link and Nav Timing
In Making a mobile connection I describe how after just a few seconds of inactivity your mobile phone demotes the radio link to your carrier network. It typically takes 1-2 seconds to re-establish the radio link to full bandwidth capacity. This is a huge delay! A few days ago I was discussing desktop vs. mobile […]
Frontend SPOF in Beijing
This past December I contributed an article called Frontend SPOF in Beijing to PerfPlanet’s Performance Calendar. I hope that everyone who reads my blog also read the Performance Calendar – it’s an amazing collection of web performance articles and gurus. But in case you don’t I’m cross-posting it here. I saw a great presentation from […]
Cache compressed? or uncompressed?
My previous blog post, Cache them if you can, suggests that current cache sizes are too small – especially on mobile. Given this concern about cache size a relevant question is: If a response is compressed, does the browser save it compressed or uncompressed? Compression typically reduces responses by 70%. This means that a browser […]
Cache them if you can
“The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.” I always smile when I hear a web performance speaker say this. I forget who said it first, but I’ve heard it numerous times at conferences and meetups over the past few years. It’s true! Caching is critical for making web pages faster. I’ve written extensively […]
the Performance Golden Rule
Yesterday I did a workshop at Google Ventures for some of their portfolio companies. I didn’t know how much performance background the audience would have, so I did an overview of everything performance-related starting with my first presentations back in 2007. It was very nostalgic. It has been years since I talked about the best […]
HTTP Archive: 2011 recap
I started the HTTP Archive back in October 2010. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. The project is going well: The number of websites archived has grown from ~15K to ~55K. (Our goal for this year is 1M!) In May we partnered with Blaze.io to launch the HTTP Archive Mobile. In June we […]
JavaScript Performance
Last night I spoke at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup. I gave a brand new talk called JavaScript Performance that focuses on script loading and async snippets. The snippet example I chose was the Google Analytics async snippet. The script-loading part of that snippet is only six lines, but a lot of thought and testing […]
Silk, iPad, Galaxy comparison
In my previous blog post I announced Loadtimer – a mobile test harness for measuring page load times. I was motivated to create Loadtimer because recent reviews of the Kindle Fire lacked the quantified data and reliable test procedures needed to compare browser performance. Most performance evaluations of Silk that have come out since its […]
Loadtimer: a mobile test harness
Measuring mobile performance is hard When Amazon announced their Silk browser I got excited reading about the “split architecture”. I’m not big on ereaders but I pre-ordered my Kindle Fire that day. It arrived a week or two ago. I’ve been playing with it trying to find a scientific way to measure page load times […]
Add your site & custom fonts
The Nov 15 2011 crawls for the HTTP Archive and HTTP Archive Mobile are done. Two new things were added. Add your site Our goal is to crawl the world’s top 1,000,000 URLs. This month we doubled the number of URLs from 17K to 35K. We’re still a ways away but making progress. But what […]
HTTP Archive growing
Today the number of URLs analyzed was doubled in both the HTTP Archive (from 17K to 34K URLs) and in the HTTP Archive Mobile (from 1K to 2K URLs). This is a small step toward our goal of 1 million URLs, but it validates numerous code changes that landed recently: 22: update URL lists – […]
Velocity Europe – High Performance Berlin!
Velocity Europe is less than two weeks away. It’s happening November 8-9 in Berlin at the Hotel Maritim ProArte. I’ve heard good things about the venue and am excited to get there and check it out. This event has been a long time coming. A handful of web performance and operations savants (including members of […]
HTTP Archive: new code, new charts
The HTTP Archive is a permanent record of web performance information started in October 2010. The world’s top 17,000 web pages are analyzed twice each month to collect information such as the number and size of HTTP requests, whether responses are cacheable, the percent of pages with errors, and the average Page Speed score. The […]
frontend SPOF survey
Pat Meenan had a great blog post yesterday, Testing for Frontend SPOF. “SPOF” means single point of failure. I coined the term frontend SPOF to describe the all-too-likely situation where the HTML document returns successfully, but some other resource (a stylesheet, script, or font file) blocks the entire website from loading. This typically manifests itself […]
Improving app cache
I recently found out about the W3C Workshop on The Future of Off-line Web Applications on November 5 in Redwood City. I won’t be able to attend (I’ll be heading to Velocity Europe), but I feel like app cache needs improving so I summarized my thoughts and sent it to the workshop organizers. I also […]
UA switching: be careful
At least once a day I’m in a conversation, email thread, or twitter exchange about monitoring websites. Lately this has focused on mobile. Tools like WebPagetest make it easier to monitor websites from the perspective of a desktop browser, but doing this from the perspective of a mobile device is still a significant challenge. This […]
App cache & localStorage survey
In preparation for my talk at HTML5 Dev Conf I surveyed the Alexa US Top 10 websites to see which ones use app cache and localStorage. I mostly focus on mobile these days so it’s natural to think I ran these tests from a mobile browser, which I did. But I also tested with a […]
Making a mobile connection
I just returned from Breaking Development Conference, an amazing gathering of many of the brightest minds in mobile web development. On the flight home I watched the video ($$) and slides from Rajiv Vijayakumar’s talk on Understanding Mobile Web Browser Performance at Velocity 2011. Rajiv works at Qualcomm where his team has done extensive performance […]
Waterfall UI Conventions
I spend a lot of time looking at HTTP waterfall charts. Each browser has its own waterfall chart tool which makes sense since the way to track network events differs across browsers. There are some tools that span multiple browsers, like HttpWatch. Since I work across all browsers I’m impacted by the lack of UI […]