4 ms·

I was hooping for something more than what Google's page speed or YSlow can tell you. Is this really "everything" one can do to optimize his site? I'm really hu

by CWIZO 15y ago

I was hooping for something more than what Google's page speed or YSlow can tell you. Is this really "everything" one can do to optimize his site? I'm really hungry for some more advanced (if you will) techniques as I don't know what else to do with our pages (they are fast mind you, I'd just like to make them faster still). And to add something constructive (besides a question) to the whole thing: "Aggressive caches are best, with an incrementing querystring parameter at the end of them to force browsers to reload them when you make a change to them." That is good. But even better is to include the version number in the filename (or path) itself: image.jpg?v=2 -> image_v1.jpg ... this doesn't throw some public proxies off and they cache your content that way. See this page for more details: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/caching.html#LeverageProxyCaching http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/caching.html#Le... edit: I would also like to see some article explaining how EXACTLY is google measuring our page load times. Because everything I've measured myself on our pages is fucking fast, but google seems to disagree (in order of magnitudes different results). The only logical explanation I've come up with is that google is measuring speed of our page from the states and our servers are in Slovenia. And that means that the page is super fast for our Slovenian users (which are the only one that matter since it is a local page) but slow for google who is way over there on the other side of Earth. This really pisses me off to be honest since there is only so much I can do and we are being punished (as in lower rankings due to speed) for not following some rules that we don't know.

TomGullen 15y ago
Great tip there, thank you! I beleive you can do more, for example if you start looking: - DNS (I don't know too much about this though) - How the web server handles the requests (I saw a post here on HN about this recently but can't find it where MS/Google change some deep settings to improve loading time) - Preloading pages by guessing users next page choice All are quite difficult to execute however and provide diminishing returns over making sure you have all the fundamental things set up correctly.
- CWIZO 15y ago
  You are thinking about TCP slow start: http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat... I'm looking into that yes.
  - youngtaff 15y ago
    Tuning initial congestion window (aka slow-start)... On Linux - http://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/tune-tcp-initcwnd-for-optimum-performance/#change-initcwnd http://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/tune-tcp-initcwnd-for-optimum-... On Windows - http://www.andysnotebook.com/2011/11/increasing-the-tcp-initial-congestion-window-on-windows-2008-server-r2.html http://www.andysnotebook.com/2011/11/increasing-the-tcp-init...
shingen 15y ago
Drop Paul Allen an email about bypassing the http server and machine coding the html serving. He has some great tips.
- CWIZO 15y ago
  Surly you don't mean Microsoft Paul Allen, right :) ?
  - sbierwagen 15y ago
    It was a joke. He was referring to using native code: a binary executable running on the local machine, instead of a web app.
    - TomGullen 15y ago
      I'll remember that one for the next party I'm at!
  - shingen 15y ago
    As a programmer, Allen was famous for often going straight to machine code to get maximum performance. Long after Microsoft moved to mostly using higher level languages for development, Allen continued to write tons of machine code. It was a lost art 20 years ago, that much more so now in the days of throw-away computing power.
TomGullen 15y ago
In response to your edits I agree, it would be nice if we knew more. Our website performance chart is under-representing our site in my opinion and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it. I also think they are possibly counting Tweet button/g+1/Facebook frames in the time which is wrong in my opinion as these are such small fragments on a webpage yet are often responsible for a large percentage of the load time (for us it is up to 50%!)
- CWIZO 15y ago
  +1 Also I think that if you have video (at least flash, since that's what we have) or games, that then google times the amount of time it takes for the complete video/game to load. Which is complete madness considering that the video/game is playable long before it's fully loaded. But I can't say that it really does that since I have no way of knowing :/ But I do think that you are correct on the widgets part.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    If you've got a few games or games on different sites then it seems this would be an easy thing to do A/B testing on. You could provide (what amounts to a splash screen) a small flash file that loads a second flash file when you click "play" or "help" or whatever. Does this for one set of sites and compare how they do in the SERPs and for retention, etc.. Then make a HN post about it.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
That is good. But even better is to include the version number in the filename (or path) itself: image.jpg?v=2 -> image_v1.jpg... Just a note - if you are using django, use django-mediagenerator. With a little bit of configuration, you can take care of quite a few of the easy wins - it will combine jslib1.js, jslib2.js, jslib3.js into jslib-<hash>.js and minify it (if you ever modify jslib2.js, the hash will change, of course). Hitting only these easy wins shaved about 250ms off my page load time. http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/django-mediagenerator http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/django-mediagenera...
joshfraser 15y ago
If you're looking for newer stuff going on in the performance world, check out some of the optimizations we are working on at Torbit using html 5 localStorage, WebP and async loading of CSS: http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/31/localstorage-mobile-performance/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/31/localstorage-mobile-perfor... http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/02/webp-statistics/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/02/webp-statistics/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/11/17/a-better-way-to-load-css/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/11/17/a-better-way-to-load-css/
- CWIZO 15y ago
  cheers! I'll have a look.

by CWIZO 15y ago

TomGullen 15y ago

Great tip there, thank you! I beleive you can do more, for example if you start looking: - DNS (I don't know too much about this though) - How the web server handles the requests (I saw a post here on HN about this recently but can't find it where MS/Google change some deep settings to improve loading time) - Preloading pages by guessing users next page choice All are quite difficult to execute however and provide diminishing returns over making sure you have all the fundamental things set up correctly.

CWIZO 15y ago
You are thinking about TCP slow start: http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat... I'm looking into that yes.
- youngtaff 15y ago
  Tuning initial congestion window (aka slow-start)... On Linux - http://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/tune-tcp-initcwnd-for-optimum-performance/#change-initcwnd http://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/tune-tcp-initcwnd-for-optimum-... On Windows - http://www.andysnotebook.com/2011/11/increasing-the-tcp-initial-congestion-window-on-windows-2008-server-r2.html http://www.andysnotebook.com/2011/11/increasing-the-tcp-init...

shingen 15y ago

Drop Paul Allen an email about bypassing the http server and machine coding the html serving. He has some great tips.

CWIZO 15y ago
Surly you don't mean Microsoft Paul Allen, right :) ?
- sbierwagen 15y ago
  It was a joke. He was referring to using native code: a binary executable running on the local machine, instead of a web app.
  - TomGullen 15y ago
    I'll remember that one for the next party I'm at!
- shingen 15y ago
  As a programmer, Allen was famous for often going straight to machine code to get maximum performance. Long after Microsoft moved to mostly using higher level languages for development, Allen continued to write tons of machine code. It was a lost art 20 years ago, that much more so now in the days of throw-away computing power.

TomGullen 15y ago

In response to your edits I agree, it would be nice if we knew more. Our website performance chart is under-representing our site in my opinion and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it. I also think they are possibly counting Tweet button/g+1/Facebook frames in the time which is wrong in my opinion as these are such small fragments on a webpage yet are often responsible for a large percentage of the load time (for us it is up to 50%!)

CWIZO 15y ago
+1 Also I think that if you have video (at least flash, since that's what we have) or games, that then google times the amount of time it takes for the complete video/game to load. Which is complete madness considering that the video/game is playable long before it's fully loaded. But I can't say that it really does that since I have no way of knowing :/ But I do think that you are correct on the widgets part.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  If you've got a few games or games on different sites then it seems this would be an easy thing to do A/B testing on. You could provide (what amounts to a splash screen) a small flash file that loads a second flash file when you click "play" or "help" or whatever. Does this for one set of sites and compare how they do in the SERPs and for retention, etc.. Then make a HN post about it.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

That is good. But even better is to include the version number in the filename (or path) itself: image.jpg?v=2 -> image_v1.jpg... Just a note - if you are using django, use django-mediagenerator. With a little bit of configuration, you can take care of quite a few of the easy wins - it will combine jslib1.js, jslib2.js, jslib3.js into jslib-<hash>.js and minify it (if you ever modify jslib2.js, the hash will change, of course). Hitting only these easy wins shaved about 250ms off my page load time. http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/django-mediagenerator http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/django-mediagenera...

joshfraser 15y ago

If you're looking for newer stuff going on in the performance world, check out some of the optimizations we are working on at Torbit using html 5 localStorage, WebP and async loading of CSS: http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/31/localstorage-mobile-performance/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/31/localstorage-mobile-perfor... http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/02/webp-statistics/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/05/02/webp-statistics/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/11/17/a-better-way-to-load-css/ http://torbit.com/blog/2011/11/17/a-better-way-to-load-css/

CWIZO 15y ago
cheers! I'll have a look.