… and a double Dec 31st day with one more post from Pat. Here’s to an optimized 2012! Cheers!
Wise words from Tom on approaching performance optimization projects for busy multi-tasking developers. Here’s to an optimized 2012!
James shares confess.js – a tool he built on top of PhantomJS for scripting a headless WebKit and automating performance data collection and cache manifest generation
Nicole shares Antti Koivisto’s CSS efficiency updates to WebKit and shows us how the way we think about CSS selector performance should change accordingly.
David encourages us to look beyond reducing HTTP requests, file sizes and fast JavaScript. Let’s start focusing more on the UI layer, he suggests, arming us with the tools to do so.
Pavel shows how to collect and track performance data over time using Selenium and BrowserMob and posting the results to HARStorage.com
JP shows us hot to build a performance test suite using open source tools
Images on our websites are the largest payload sent back and forth across the wires of the net taking big part in slowing down user experience. Do you do the lossless image optimization with tools like jpegtran and pngout? How about lossy optimizations?
Why you’re probably reading your performance measurement results wrong (but at least you’re in good company)
by Joshua Bixby
Measuring performance is one thing, actually looking at the data we collect is another. And just as important is looking at how we look at data and how we judge the results and takeaways. Otherwise all else goes to waste. Josh Bixby has tips for reading performance data and avoiding jumping to quick conclusions which could often be wrong.
Eloquent as always, Billy Hoffman shares his thoughts on 3rd party content and 3rd party performance advice
Tobie shows how to delay the parsing and execution of JavaScript with a lazy evaluation technique. This could be critical to the feeling of a snappy app on a mobile device where parsing and evaluating times can be significant: as much as 300ms to evaluate jQuery on iPhone 4 for example, or close to a second on iPhone 3.
Matthew and Bryan introducing mod_spdy bringing the SPDY protocol to an Apache near you
Tony introduces strace (with alternatives dtrace in iOS and EWT in Windows) for those cases when the browser developer tools are not enough and you need to know exactly whan the browser is telling the operating system to do.
Aarons shows us how if a significant percentage of your visitors use Firefox 7 or 8, you may very well be wasting a lot of time interpreting the Site Speed data and even more time taking the wrong actions.
As developers, we’ve tested our websites to make sure we’ve followed the points and goals recommended by Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s PageSpeed. We’ve tested and tested… using our desktop browsers.
It looks like there is great interest to quantifying performance impact on business, linking response time to income and customer satisfaction. A lot of information was published and there is no doubt that there is a strong correlation between response times and business metrics. But we should keep in mind that the relationship is not so simple and linear and it may be cases when it would matter.
After you read Alois into to nav timing article, now you have a quick and free do-it-yourself solution to RUM (Real User Monitoring) by Buddy Brewer using Navigation Timing and Google Analytics
Bots, search engine crawlers, malicious scanners – they all fight and take out the limited resources of your server. Did you know what percent of all requests to your site are not by human users? Matthew tells us some war stories and gives ideas how to deal with the bots.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Say hello to icy. icy It’s an iOS app that lets you debug HTTP. It’s like HTTPWatch or WebPagetest but for mobile. Like blaze.io’s mobitest but in your pocket, works with 3G, Edge (as these can have different characteristics and carrier optimizations than Wifi) and also lets you inspect […]
One can only improve what one measures. OK, but how do you measure? Let Alois be your guide in both DIY approaches and newer W3C specs.
Éric Daspet describes a problem in Android with CSS and multiple background images
Marcel Duran draws the YSlow logo with pure CSS and compares the results in terms of byte size and rendering time among browsers and image formats. Are we there yet with regards to performance and CSS3 image replacements?
Secrets of High Performance Native Mobile Applications
by Israel Nir
Native (or “Hybrid”) Mobile Apps still have to transfer data over the network. In his post, Israel draws attention to big files, compression, unnecessary downloads and other common mistakes to avoid when making your apps faster.
Did you know that YSlow has a Scoremeter and a nodejs-powered command-line version? Betty tells us about it together with a stroll down YSlow memory lane
Steve Souders joins us from the second Velocity conference in the great and mystical land of China with a tale about the Great Wall and the Great Frontend SPOF
Josh shares some of the challenges of automation and some of the lessons we have learned from optimizing hundreds of sites
Brian is mining the HTTPArchive to draw conclusions on the current and future state of HTTP and the need and workarounds for parallelization.
If you’re looking for consistency and stability when you start to explore mobile carrier networks, you should look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you enjoy the energy and excitement that so often can be found in the chaos that surrounds an unstable environment, then you’ll find yourself right at home.
In the search of the perfect third-party async snippet
This question of inlining all scripts, styles and images is a great example of taking a best practice too far. Yes, reducing the number of HTTP requests is a valuable best practice. Yes, inlining everything is the ultimate way to reduce the number of requests (in theory to one). But NO, it’s not the best way to make your site faster. Let Guy explain why.
Reading data from localStorage is less expensive than making an HTTP request. Or is it? Nicholas Zakas digs deep into the performance of reading from localStorage and shares the results
Pat Meenan kicks off this year’s performance calendar with a nice geeky piece on how WebPagetest (and other tools on Windows) work behind the scenes