Page Speed Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Page Speed Service

#11

Post by retube » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:03 PM UTC

> Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe

I don't get it. Given that most websites have some dynamic content, that static assets can be updated, edited or otherwise altered at any time, Google must be fetching content on a request-by-request basis, i/e acting as a proxy. How can this be faster? You've got the existing latency of fetching your content, PLUS the extra latency of Google zipping and concatenating assets and forwarding the result on to the client.

Doesn't make any sense.

Re: Page Speed Service

#12

Post by niyazpk » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:17 PM UTC

jbk wrote: post #7

I think I just don't get it... The optimized version is actually slower than the normal one... http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_KN_1bd8e23bea97037c... I must be missing something obvious...

The same with our website. (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_2Y_cf94015a7345bbed...) 8% faster than Google's version. Yay!

To be fair we have done a lot of optimizations on the site, but still feels like I may be missing something obvious.

Re: Page Speed Service

#13

Post by zokiboy » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:34 PM UTC

retube wrote: post #11

> Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe I don't get it. Given that most websites have some dynamic content, that static assets can be updated, edited or otherwise altered at any time, Google must be fetching content on a request-by-request basis, i/e acting as a proxy. How…

Didn't make sense to me either. Now I realized it optimizes static content: css, javascrips and images on the firs run, then it serves optimized version until you update them. There is some latency to fetching dynamic content and that's the reason optimized sites are slower on this test.

Re: Page Speed Service

#14

Post by rkalla » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:39 PM UTC

Anyone notice all the testing locations are AWS Regions?

I was assuming webpagetest was a Google property and figured they would use their own data centers.

Re: Page Speed Service

#15

Post by ZoFreX » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:52 PM UTC

bobfunk wrote: post #3

Seems like strong competition to Cloudflare ( https://www.cloudflare.com/ ). Always thought that was their greatest risk, someone with a huge, worldwide, already paid for CDN stepping in an offering the same service. They still have the statistics and security features going for them, though...

Cloudflare does a LOT more than this. In fact, the area where they cross-over is the area that interests me the least - I am quite capable of making a website balls-to-the-wall fast without either of their products, but Cloudflare leverage their size to accomplish things I literally could not accomplish without them. I initially wrote Cloudflare off because of this, they don't do a great job of telling you about the coolest things they do.

Re: Page Speed Service

#16

Post by ZoFreX » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:56 PM UTC

If anyone on HN thinks their site might be sub-optimal on the front-end, contact me on whyslow@zofrex.com and I'll take a look, and let you know what you can do to speed things up :)

Re: Page Speed Service

#17

Post by krmmalik » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 1:02 PM UTC

ZoFreX wrote: post #15

bobfunk wrote: post #3

Seems like strong competition to Cloudflare ( https://www.cloudflare.com/ ). Always thought that was their greatest risk, someone with a huge, worldwide, already paid for CDN stepping in an offering the same service. They still have the statistics and security features going for them, though...

Cloudflare does a LOT more than this. In fact, the area where they cross-over is the area that interests me the least - I am quite capable of making a website balls-to-the-wall fast without either of their products, but Cloudflare leverage their size to accomplish things I literally could not accomplish without them. I initially wrote Cloudflare off because of this, they don't do a great job of telling you about the…

Yeah i agree there seems to be some overlap with CloudFlare. I wanted to sign up a client of mine who is running a Wordpress site to CloudFlare, but wasnt able to do so because it required moving their complete zone file over to CloudFlare which they werent able to do for multiple reasons. CloudFlare dont seem to provide a solution where you can just point an A record to their servers (currently).

I wonder if this Google PageSpeed service can provide a similar service to CF, without needing to move the Zone file across completely. Mind you CloudFlare's basic service is free.

Re: Page Speed Service

#18

Post by a3camero » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 1:12 PM UTC

ZoFreX wrote: post #15

bobfunk wrote: post #3

Seems like strong competition to Cloudflare ( https://www.cloudflare.com/ ). Always thought that was their greatest risk, someone with a huge, worldwide, already paid for CDN stepping in an offering the same service. They still have the statistics and security features going for them, though...

Cloudflare does a LOT more than this. In fact, the area where they cross-over is the area that interests me the least - I am quite capable of making a website balls-to-the-wall fast without either of their products, but Cloudflare leverage their size to accomplish things I literally could not accomplish without them. I initially wrote Cloudflare off because of this, they don't do a great job of telling you about the…

Care to elaborate? I've been wondering what the advantages are but haven't had the time to look into it in more depth. What's been your experience?

Re: Page Speed Service

#19

Post by brown9-2 » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 1:24 PM UTC

rkalla wrote: post #14

Anyone notice all the testing locations are AWS Regions? I was assuming webpagetest was a Google property and figured they would use their own data centers.

That doesn't prove much though, does it? "Northern Virginia" is a pretty broad region.

Re: Page Speed Service

#20

Post by bluelu » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 1:28 PM UTC

It's pretty iteresting in what direction google is pushing.

Since all the requests are handled by google (you have to change the dns servers to point to google), this will give them complete website profiles, on what surfers visit and how they can rank websites better. They could even adapt their crawling on that No need to crawl websites which a human has never visited before.

I would also consider that they might evaluate the logs from their open dns servers to rank websites and decide what's important and what not.

It's like having a cookie in adsense or analytics, just nobody noticing it.