
Page Speed Service - handraiser
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/07/page-speed-service-web-performance.html
======
dave1010uk
The settings docs page [1] shows what this service does:

    
    
      Combine CSS
      Combine JavaScript
      Image Optimize
      Image Resize
      JavaScript Optimize
      Move CSS to head
      Proxy CSS
      Proxy Images
      Proxy JavaScript
    

You can see demos of the Page Speed Service doing each of these things at [2].

The dashboard docs page [3] shows that there's _some_ analytics but not a
great deal.

[1] <https://code.google.com/speed/pss/docs/settings.html>

[2] <http://www.pssdemos.com/>

[3] <https://code.google.com/speed/pss/docs/dashboard.html>

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bobfunk
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...

~~~
ZoFreX
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.

~~~
krmmalik
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.

~~~
blantonl
Cloudflare does have the ability to let you define CNAMES for your site and
manage those in your own DNS outside of Cloudflare. I believe it is in limited
beta right now but we are testing it and it works great.

Contact them for more details.

~~~
krmmalik
Im a little hazy on my DNS knowledge. I understand upto zone file, dns and A
records. Haven't quite understood how i would achieve this with a CNAME? _
i've tried to understand many times what CNAME's are but never got my head
around it.

Would you mind elaborating a little? I did contact them about a month ago, and
explained the problem and they just told me it wasnt possible at this moment
in time(?)

~~~
jackwagon
A CNAME points a name to another name. In the case of Cloudflare, Google, or
others, they need to know what CNAME you are using (say, www.example.com CNAME
some.proxyservice.com) so they can map the request to your content.

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bluelu
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.

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jbk
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...](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_KN_1bd8e23bea97037ce5976777b9732c6a/)

I must be missing something obvious...

~~~
niyazpk
The same with our website.
([http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_2Y_cf94015a7345bbed...](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_2Y_cf94015a7345bbedcee24323d6054a58/))
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.

~~~
andypants
Getting similar results. I don't really get it, the optimized version takes a
few seconds before anything other than my background is displayed. By the time
the rest of the 'optimized' site is being rendered, my original site's already
loaded.

(This is from watching the video in my test results)

~~~
buro9
I don't think we're the target audience.

I suspect the biggest gains will be sites based on proprietary products which
may be in quite a state.

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retube
> 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.

~~~
zokiboy
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.

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ZoFreX
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 :)

~~~
ZoFreX
If anyone could give me feedback on why the above is being downvoted, I'd
appreciate it. Ta!

Edit: I'd actually like feedback please... it went down to 0, then up to 1,
then down to 0 again.. and then back up to 2 after I posted this reply. I
wasn't asking for upvotes, I want to know what it is that is making some
people downvote this. Is it not in keeping with the etiquette here, is there
some unspoken rule I'm violating?

~~~
icode
It could be interpreted as spam. People often think that "I want to help you"
is "I want you to pay me" in disguise :)

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ErikD
People should realize that by using this service, all sensitive data posted to
your website will be readable by google.

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ck2
Can end-users somehow opt-out of the pages they are viewing passing through
Google?

It should be technically possible but I doubt they will offer that.

~~~
RyanKearney
Why would you want to?

~~~
cryptoz
Some users are uncomfortable with the idea that even if they avoid Google
entirely by not using their search, OS, email, or maps, that Google can still
have a profile of them and which sites they visit.

If you don't like the company and want to avoid them, you will now have to
choose to not visit websites served through their DNS. That's much more
difficult than just using a different email provider.

~~~
carbonica
If one wants to avoid Google, they also need to make sure anyone they e-mail
isn't using GAFYD. How many anti-Google folks do that?

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crc321
Tried their test. It was slower on my site...

[http://blog.craigrcannon.com/post/8170801499/my-site-
tested-...](http://blog.craigrcannon.com/post/8170801499/my-site-tested-
slower-with-google-page-service)

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scytale
Absolutely great. What do people await? It is a free service helps to improve
ya site. I run the g-pagespeedtest + webpagetest and received a list with
errors in my project <http://www.webdesign-angebote.com> Especially pics and
js made problems.

And the suggestions are okay, really helpful {background-color:
expression(this.runtimeStyle.backgoundColor = 'none'} and "Compress Images",
but thats been my fault. I adepted it immediatly and hope for improved user-
and rankingresults.

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bcl
I really don't see the point of passing it through them. Instead I'd rather
they just tell me how to optimize it so I can apply the improvements myself.

~~~
joshuacc
They offer that as well. <http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/>

~~~
BarkMore
Pagespeed is on the soon to be closed Google Labs
([http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-
fewe...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-
arrows.html)).

~~~
spullara
They have already announced that Page Speed will not be closed and will be
moved off labs.

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pawelwentpawel
Good stuff but I'm not sure if if optimizing a website consisting of static
pages this way really makes sense. If the website was done by an idiot then
yes, but most of the users probably won't even notice any change in speed if
the website was developed correctly earlier.

Also I probably wouldn't trust some other company enough to proxy my stuff to
my users for the price of a slight optimization.

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rkalla
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.

~~~
brown9-2
That doesn't prove much though, does it? "Northern Virginia" is a pretty broad
region.

~~~
bigtones
Weird that their default test browser is IE8 too. Hello Chrome ?

~~~
StavrosK
A dead link by Canopy below says:

"WebPagetest is not run by Google."

and points to their about page. Apparently, he's right.

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mbh
I tried it on www.google.com !! Their optimized version is slower than their
normal version :) Check it out for yourself
[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_TR_d83c788b1387dab0...](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_TR_d83c788b1387dab0a6f7319190f74d75/)

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smtroan
+1 useful. On a related note, does anyone know of something similar that can
diagnose and optimize a browser's connection to the internet (the other side
of end-to-end performance)?

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zokiboy
Does this work with dynamic web pages, like Facebook or news.ycombinator.com?

~~~
eli
I haven't checked, but I assume it works fine if you've got all your Cache and
Vary headers set properly.

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devmach
just out of curiosity i checked some of my web based application :

\- orginal : load time 5 seconds *

\- optimized : infinity....

I think they have to optimize their optimizer...

* : all js & css & image files about 900kb and the connection is 1Mbit adsl.

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pavpanchekha
Just another example of Google trying to improve the world.

I would personally be a bit worried about the level of control this would mean
giving up. But I just like to tinker. I know plenty of people for whom this is
perfect.

~~~
trotsky
Seems hard to believe their motivation for seeing a ton of consumer web
traffic on third party sites is to improve the world. I mean, obviously google
analytics isn't some altruistic attempt to help people track their web usage
better.

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tybris
Deprecated in 5, 4, 3, ...

