

Let's make the web faster - yarapavan
http://code.google.com/speed/downloads.html

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tewks
Take some of this site with a grain of salt; the bogus PHP speed
recommendations still live:

<http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-php.html>

[http://groups.google.com/group/make-the-web-
faster/browse_th...](http://groups.google.com/group/make-the-web-
faster/browse_thread/thread/ddfbe82dd80408cc?pli=1)

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messel
Centralized info for web page optimization. I wonder at the efforts spent on
page speed improvements, versus letting tech improve and publishing tools
handle much of the implementation details.

I think web masters, sites and developers should focus all their efforts on
content quality,and check a box that the page loads fast enough now.

To the contrary of this, I consciously admire optimized page loads, that
flicker into existence. But this is secondary to the "knowledge payload" of
the site.

~~~
patio11
The most critical components of page load optimization are simple tick-the-box
items when setting up your application that need to be automatic for every web
engineer, but aren't. They are mostly not a matter of having the tech improve.
They are mostly not involved with "publishing tools" at all, insofar as by the
time your CMS is in the picture it is way too late.

Partial checklist:

It takes something like four lines in your web server config to turn on gzip.
Did you turn on gzip?

It takes perhaps ten lines of code to splat all your Javascript and CSS files
into one file at deployment. If you were running Rails, this would be about
fifteen keystrokes or so. Did you do it?

You should be loading your static assets from 2-3 hosts to maximize how many
can be loaded in parallel. This is, again, two minutes of work and doesn't
even require you to actually possess multiple hosts since you can just create
multiple DNS entries pointing to the same one. Did you do it?

~~~
trebor
Don't forget CSS spriting; static assets from multiple hosts is great, but
when you minimize your dependencies AND their size the loading time appears
even faster.

~~~
patio11
Ix-nay on the sprites-ay! Save the optimizations which require conscious
thought until after we've got them hooked! We don't want to scare them away!

~~~
litewulf
You can make CSS sprites automatically. I'm not sure thats the best idea in
the world, but its certainly doable.

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Jakob
The linked download section features nothing new for a web developer.

But its nice to see a centralized approach to do a "best practice" in web
speed. Though in its infant stages (e.g. the image optimization articles are
very old news and lack most of the modern techniques described in
[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/15/clever-png-
optimi...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/15/clever-png-optimization-
techniques/) and [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/25/png-
optimization-...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/25/png-optimization-
guide-more-clever-techniques/)) this could be a good checklist for web
developers.

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dkersten
Make the web faster? EASY!

Step 1) Remove all external advertisement, that shit slows everyone down.

Step 2) Remove all large images (when they're resized to small sizes). I
thought that this was a 90's thing, but it still happens too often.

Step 3) Remove all domain names, all too often DNS is slooow.

Step 3) Remove large useless flash banners and other such _stuff thats
supposed to be pretty but adds nothing functional to a site_.

Step 4) Things others mentioned here + whatever I missed here...

~~~
pbz
Step 5) Remove any text; slows the download

~~~
dkersten
Thats true. Nobody reads it anyway, we're all here just for the porn, everyone
knows that.

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megamark16
Sweet! An open source project that I have (kind of) contributed to before made
the list! I wrote some code for Pylot to support dynamic fields (in my case it
was my ASP.NET "__VIEWSTATE" field, but it could be adjusted to support any
dynamic field). I don't think my contribution has been committed to the trunk,
but Corey added me to the list of contributors anyway, so that was nice :)

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lawfulfalafel
I love how google constantly contributes to the entire internet community in
spite of the lack of immediate returns. I mean it takes some serious cojones
to bet on the long term with stuff like this. I really hope companies start
following this lead in the future.

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sb
just for the record since nobody else mentioned it: if you find this kind of
material interesting/relevant, you may very well check with "velocity"
conferences and their presentations (which are available online--or were for
last years conference)

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_ck_
Great collection in one place! I use about half of them, going to explore the
other half...

