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Website Performance Tutorials

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Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#2
Can someone post performance tips for Python? Either links or just suggestions. I've been coding in Python for a couple weeks and I'm not sure about what tools I have at my disposal for identifying bottlenecks and subsequently how to address those bottlenecks.

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#4
post #3

Good stuff, this must be a relatively new section. I've also found Yahoo UI and performance section a great resource too. For better or worse, Yahoo! apps tend to be heavier on the design and graphics side so they have some good practices in place. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

I can recommend to install Yahoo YSlow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/), a Firebug extension for Firefox. next to the achieved performance test results of a specific page, it also shows how to improve the performance. I think it's a quite useful tool and perhaps a must-have extension for webdevelopers.

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#5
post #2

Can someone post performance tips for Python? Either links or just suggestions. I've been coding in Python for a couple weeks and I'm not sure about what tools I have at my disposal for identifying bottlenecks and subsequently how to address those bottlenecks.

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips http://scipy.org/PerformancePython

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#6
What I really would like to see is an independent third-party which cares nothing about data mining (maybe the w3c) host commonly used scripts (e.g. jquery) on Akamai and minified/compressed; all the parameters to their optimum instead of the myriad of options people use. They'd be so many browser cache hits.

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#7
I would expect something a lot more from google. All these ideas are way too elementary and some are just misguided. Advice like "crop your image"...come on. The misguided ones are things like "use single quotes instead of double quotes when printing in php since one does not look for variables in the string text". The is just misguided and is probably the last thing your should worry about. This is orders of magnitude from any useful optimization that is actually impacting your site performance.

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#8
post #2

Can someone post performance tips for Python? Either links or just suggestions. I've been coding in Python for a couple weeks and I'm not sure about what tools I have at my disposal for identifying bottlenecks and subsequently how to address those bottlenecks.

My suggestion: your bottleneck is highly unlikely to be Python. Most web applications get to wait on DB access, network latency, and then browser rendering. All the backend optimization in the world just gets you to these bottlenecks faster.

(It is also a whole lot of black magic compared to front-end optimization. See any of the presentations by the YSlow guys -- google [high performance web sites] and look for the slides or videos. They give simple, tested, repeatable "do this and it will work" best practices. Backend optimization, on the other hand, relies far too much on handwavy lore and near-useless-or-actually-harmful micro-optimizations. For example, "StringBuffers are sooooooo much faster than String concatenation!")

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#9
post #8
post #2

Can someone post performance tips for Python? Either links or just suggestions. I've been coding in Python for a couple weeks and I'm not sure about what tools I have at my disposal for identifying bottlenecks and subsequently how to address those bottlenecks.

My suggestion: your bottleneck is highly unlikely to be Python. Most web applications get to wait on DB access, network latency, and then browser rendering. All the backend optimization in the world just gets you to these bottlenecks faster. (It is also a whole lot of black magic compared to front-end optimization. See any of the presentations by the YSlow guys -- google [high performance web sites] and look for the…

"your bottleneck is highly unlikely to be Python. Most web applications get to wait on DB access, network latency, and then browser rendering"

I second that. My experience is first look into the DB time and second browser rendering. I have thought Python was the cause for slowness many times and each time it again proved to be DB time. Also, don't run multiple selects to the database for a set of records, make it one select.

Re: Website Performance Tutorials

#10
post #7

I would expect something a lot more from google. All these ideas are way too elementary and some are just misguided. Advice like "crop your image"...come on. The misguided ones are things like "use single quotes instead of double quotes when printing in php since one does not look for variables in the string text". The is just misguided and is probably the last thing your should worry about. This is orders of magnitu…

Look through the rest also - the advice really varies. I found the part about avoiding browser reflow [1] very useful. Just last night, I was getting usability issues with a piece of JS which was executing with each keystroke and (I now realize) sometimes causing reflow. I fixed it, but now I know what was broken :)

1. http://code.google.com/speed/articles/reflow.html

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