Hot answers tagged performance
27
Document.ready waits for the DOM to load before running any JavaScript (http://www.learningjquery.com/2006/09/introducing-document-ready).
The idea of putting it at the bottom, means that if your JS is having issues or the person has a slow connection, the rest of the page still loads first, and doesn't "hang".
The JS still runs when everything has loaded, ...
19
Google wants to provide its user base with the best experience possible when browsing the web - this is what retains their customers. A poor page load speed can have a serious effect on user experience, that is arguably the main reason Google sometimes ranks these sites less favorably.
It is also an indication that the site isn't perhaps maintained to a ...
18
Someone is going to say that the markup should be Gzipped, so I might as well be the one.
Here's a lengthy explanation of what Gzip is with links on how to set it up on Apache and IIS.
An article on WebReference states that you'll find the following performance gains when using the mod_gzip Apache module.
Webmasters typically see a 150-160%
increase ...
17
#BestQuestionEver =)
I'm the developer of the site so I should be able to answer most of these questions
You brought up some interesting points.
In terms of backend (Backend is rarely the source of bottle-necks in page loading, it's mostly loading but it's still worth going over the tech), the site runs on 2 dedicated servers from LiquidWeb (Both with ...
16
Per the official guidance
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=158541
Site Performance is an experimental Webmaster Tools Labs feature that shows you latency information about your site. (To see Site Performance data, you must add and verify your site in Webmaster Tools.)
Page load time is the total time from the moment ...
11
Your best solution is probably http://www.coralcdn.org or using Google's App Engine.
It also depends on how much content you think will be downloaded from your site. I know Amazon Cloud Front isn't free but it does only cost $.12 per GB per month in the US. See pricing here, http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/#pricing.
10
Jakob Nielsen has an excellent article, Website Response Times (June 21, 2010) in which he explains why website response times still matter.
0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response — that is, the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer. This level of responsiveness is essential to support the feeling of direct ...
10
WordPress is likely not the issue. It can easily handle that much traffic (1,000,000 visits a month is less than one every two seconds) and that many posts.
You need to figure out what's actually causing slowdowns. It might be your host, your database, a misconfiguration, a bad plugin, etc.
9
It probably isn't worth it.
I've played with removing whitespace in HTML a little bit, and saw only a 10% size reduction in payload after gzipping.
Realistically, whitespace and linefeed removal is doing work that the compression would be doing for us. We're just adding a dab of human-assisted efficiency:
Raw Compressed
...
9
It doesn't have to be unique. But if it's not it makes your life more difficult. Having a unique username means there is only one possible password for that username. If it's wrong, you don't have to go looking for another user with the same username to compare it to. It's gets really complicated when someone requests a missing password. How do you know who ...
9
Like the others said, Wordpress can handle this amount of traffic just fine.
I would suggest one of the two caching plugins. These plugins write database-heavy pages to disk, which saves load on the database server. The difference is remarkable.
WP Super Cache
W3 Total Cache
Both are well-maintained, the latter has more features, but can be intimidating.
...
8
Google will penalize sites that are very slow (greater than 7-10 for the page to become usable). They do this because they state that users are usually not willing to wait that long when they click and usually return to the serps. Google wants to make their users happy.
In addition to the direct penalties applied by Google, there are indirect consequences ...
7
IIS7+ is actually pretty darn' fast. There isn't much you can do to speed up IIS; in general you'll optimize on the HTML, JS, Images, CSS, HTTP, HTTP headers, and possibly webapp code (C# etc). These issues are cross-platform. The user interface is of course different between Apache and IIS, but the knowledge is much the same.
Steve Souders literally wrote ...
7
It will help individual browser performance only. It will not boost network utilization in any way. When the browser renders the html, it will begin to allocate and space objects, and if it has explicit instructions on how to allocate the space, the layout parses while the image continues to load in the background. With modern broadband download speeds, this ...
7
CloudFlare, in most cases, does not cache HTML. This is because we don't want to show stale dynamic content. That said, the system can help the performance of even dynamic content in four primary ways:
CloudFlare can route traffic over preferred network routes that are often more efficient than what a request would normally take.
For sites that get a lot ...
6
Putting javascript at the bottom means that the other page content (text especially) loads before the javascript so users are not waiting for the JS to load if they have slow connections.
This does not affect document.ready, as that is called when the browser has finished preparing the DOM for a page. Either way, everything still needs to be loaded first.
6
You could also do PHP profiling, using any of a number of profilers. My preferred is XDebug:
http://www.xdebug.org/docs/profiler
It does not require you to change any of your scripts.
This should quickly point out the bottlenecks; It will also help with the MySQL part. Even though MySQL has its own reporting, you may be in a situation where the script ...
6
Have a look at Netcraft's Hosting Provider's Network Performance, it has a lot of great information such as:
Downtime (in HH:MM::SS as well as a percentage)
Connection time
Time to delivery of the first byte
and several other metrics.
As they've been doing this for so long (since 1995), this is probably the best first place to look for objective data.
I ...
6
Those aren't server issues. Once the page is loaded the server no longer has anything to do with the rendering and performance of the page. That's handled by the browser and device running the browser, in your case your computer.
I took a quick peek at your website and you've got enough JavaScript and <object>s to kill an elephant. There's just way ...
6
An issue might be DNS or keep-alive -- that is, the browser already has the IP address for your server and has a connection open to it, whereas it has to resolve the CDN's server's name and then open a new connection there, and one of those or both constitute the delay you're seeing.
Spriting, although still a good idea, wouldn't help those problems. ...
5
Neither is really better than the other. It's a matter of preference for the most part. Do you want to reload the entire page, or just reload a certain portion of it. If the form is all you're showing, ajax is probably slower than reloading the page. However, if your form is just a small portion of the page, ajax would probably be faster.
You can still ...
5
Google has outlined and explained their recommendations to best Minimize Payload Size. They include the following techniques:
Enable compression
Remove unused CSS
Minify JavaScript
Minify CSS
Minify HTML
Defer loading of JavaScript
Optimize images
Serve scaled images
Serve resources from a consistent URL
These suggestions are a part of their open-source ...
5
httperf mainly and also AB the Apache Benchmarking tool
(and a ton of instrumentation to catch duplicate queries and cache misses.)
It is simple, effective and can spawn alot of traffic from a quad-core+ machine attached to your server on gigabit ethernet. It also has cool stuff like rate limiting.
If you want to get really fancy, you can record and ...
5
In most cases, you need to have the manual submit, even when you've utilized AJAX to submit your forms. JavaScript is not always enabled for a variety of reasons. Most text-only browsers usually don't interpret JavaScript and so it's important to have a fallback. Also, although I know it's not applicable for most forms, search engines have very limited ...
5
I hate websites which do this. I like to be in control of my browser, automatically refreshing the page without valid reason/warning* is a sure fire way for me to leave a website and never come back.
*There are times when refreshing is appropriate - the bbc sports website during sporting events (live football (soccer) matches, cricket, golf etc) has a smart ...
5
Things I noticed:
Their static content is served from a third party sites which allows more files to be downloaded in parallel.
It looks like they use a Content Delivery Networks which allows for files to be downloaded from a server closest to thee nd user.
Most of the CSS is minified which makes the files size smaller
Most of their JavaScript is located ...
5
The first question is how long is too long for the user to wait. Let's use 1.5 seconds, because that's what Google judges as too slow (see this question). So assuming a dialup user gets the maximum 56kbits/second, that's 5.6 kbytes (roughly) so that's 8.4kb. That's pretty small.
Broadband speeds vary, but assuming 1Mb for the sake of argument, that's 150k ...
5
First of all: you are basically doing a lot of things very good at the moment. This results in good grades in PageSpeed for example. Also keep in mind that the biggest part of the waiting time is spent on the frontend, so it makes sense to optimize this before going deep into server configuration.
These are some ideas:
there are a lot of image requests, ...
4
I would say it depends on what type of site you are running. If it is a person site and you don't care about how many people are visiting it then I would say don't worry about it. If it is a business and you want to give people the best experience you can then I would say worry about it some. A D in YSlow is pretty low and you probably have some reasonably ...
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