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Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

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Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think i understand your comment, but it was pretty entertaining, nonetheless.

It was casual. But truthful in sentiment. You can see it as ironical in that I was educated by the Internet and not by being in the Bay Area. Yet, being in the Bay Area, making the right friends, and appropriately asking the right questions and exchanging ideas may prove more useful than the Internet, sometimes. (After all, the Internet is still by your side if you need it.)

Honest question: are you on drugs, or not a native English speaker?

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#32
post #21

For AJAX-based web applications, following is what I'd suggest in making things very zippy for the user: 1. Concatenate your JS and CSS files. Don't send out several files over the wire to the browser - the browser can only make 2 connections at a time. Be careful about JS dependencies - order is imp. in JS. 2. Minify and then compress the JS and CSS. Use Dojo's Shrinksafe or the YUI Compressor to do this. It will st…

> the browser can only make 2 connections at a time

This is slowly becoming not true anymore, decent browsers like Opera and Firefox have defaulted to 8 for a while now, and IE8 defaults to 6.

Although all your points are still valid.

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#33
post #20

Mibbit uses a custom webserver... Instead of gzipping things on the fly, I decided to just look for a .gz version on the filesystem, and use that if it's there. eg a request for 'index.html' looks for 'index.html' and 'index.html.gz'. If the gz is there it uses that and sets headers accordingly. Works incredibly well, and the deploy scripts just gzip things when they're pushed out to production.

Out of curiosity what was the reason for using a custom webserver?

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#34
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was casual. But truthful in sentiment. You can see it as ironical in that I was educated by the Internet and not by being in the Bay Area. Yet, being in the Bay Area, making the right friends, and appropriately asking the right questions and exchanging ideas may prove more useful than the Internet, sometimes. (After all, the Internet is still by your side if you need it.)

Honest question: are you on drugs, or not a native English speaker?

Coffee. I know English well enough to understand the term "ad hominem."

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was casual. But truthful in sentiment. You can see it as ironical in that I was educated by the Internet and not by being in the Bay Area. Yet, being in the Bay Area, making the right friends, and appropriately asking the right questions and exchanging ideas may prove more useful than the Internet, sometimes. (After all, the Internet is still by your side if you need it.)

I'm about to skedaddle from the Bay area, and can't say it's really worth the expense of living here. You know when people start spouting off about the supposed virtues of living in an area they're probably in real estate; at the very least, they likely have financial interest in property. At least the Internet does one thing very well, and that is expose greed and stupidity. With such a high concentration of greed (…

It's getting kind of lame being among people who want to divide their attention. I imagine being in the Bay Area I would find at least a few souls willing to spend Friday night programming hard core than carousing.

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#36
post #21

For AJAX-based web applications, following is what I'd suggest in making things very zippy for the user: 1. Concatenate your JS and CSS files. Don't send out several files over the wire to the browser - the browser can only make 2 connections at a time. Be careful about JS dependencies - order is imp. in JS. 2. Minify and then compress the JS and CSS. Use Dojo's Shrinksafe or the YUI Compressor to do this. It will st…

Another good argument in favor of doing so is that establishing a connection has a non-zero time cost. Further, your server may not have the workers to spare (so that extra connection is going to sit until the server's queue isn't backed up.)

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#37
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was casual. But truthful in sentiment. You can see it as ironical in that I was educated by the Internet and not by being in the Bay Area. Yet, being in the Bay Area, making the right friends, and appropriately asking the right questions and exchanging ideas may prove more useful than the Internet, sometimes. (After all, the Internet is still by your side if you need it.)

Honest question: are you on drugs, or not a native English speaker?

He's (she's??) a little confused by moving to the Bay Area or not. He feel's he's educated by classical standards but still has technical knowledge. He has experience learning technical/IT knowledge from the Internet, and values such knowledge, but thinks by being in the bay area, that such knowledge can be accrued faster. He doesn't like the greed he finds in the Bay Area, and is basically trying to justify the loss of potential technical knowledge by leaving (or not even going) through weighing it up against his classical knowledge that his grandmother values more than he does.

Tip: stay out of the Bay Area but not too far, maybe to San Jose and keep in touch with a few buddies, but not to those who you truly don't like.

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#39
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PNG is often not well compressed unless you've gone out of your way to do so with PNGCRUSH ( http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ ) or something similar

I think this might be better? http://optipng.sourceforge.net/

Yeah, it's pretty good. pngout is good too. But I found some really good compression with pngnq. It's lossy, but can help you with some larger optimisations.

I had an image that pngout got to 218K (221K for optipng). pngnq chopped that thing to 74K. When flipping between the images you could see some pixels change, but only if you looked really hard.

(Running pngout on that image brought it down to 71K. Nice.)

Re: Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

#40
post #21

For AJAX-based web applications, following is what I'd suggest in making things very zippy for the user: 1. Concatenate your JS and CSS files. Don't send out several files over the wire to the browser - the browser can only make 2 connections at a time. Be careful about JS dependencies - order is imp. in JS. 2. Minify and then compress the JS and CSS. Use Dojo's Shrinksafe or the YUI Compressor to do this. It will st…

4. Figure out browser caching - what to cache, how and for how long. Frequently changing code files - not a good idea to cache them for long, but images and other files, in most cases you only really need to download them once to the user's browser. Stuff to Google: etags and last-modified.

Improving site speed is a broad topic, and there would be other stuff on the server-side too where improvements can be made, like cached queries and using "prepared statements" to optimize the SQL.

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