

How we reduced page load time by 4 seconds on our startup - thegyppo
http://storecrowd.com/blog/pageload-time/

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patio11
_This was one of the first things to tackle, we’ve noticed that our Time to
First Byte is the biggest crucial factor in your website “appearing” to be
responsive._

This is contrary to received wisdom, and I love hearing contrary takes, but
the graphs shown in this post do not suggest that it is true. The post then
spends a whole lot of time explaining hard things to do which might
theoretically improve this, and very little time explaining the easy things --
on-page factors like covered in the YSlow presentations -- which were
apparently left uncompleted. That is a shame -- for the amount of work
required to even start thinking about caching you can have spriting _done_ ,
and that would have knocked off much, much more than the 25ms that was
successfully knocked off the time to first byte.

You can test this pretty easily: add a 250 ms sleep to the page. I'm guessing
that it does not add much to the user perceptible delay.

~~~
thegyppo
CSS Sprites technically shouldn't have anything to do with your TTFB since
it's got nothing to do with the actual rendering of content.

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TrevorBurnham
This stuff is pretty basic. They mention using Percona MySQL on a cluster of
dedicated servers... but they didn't even concatenate their CSS. Low-hanging
fruit.

~~~
thegyppo
There's a mention of the Rails Asset packager for CSS/JS compression there -
<http://github.com/sbecker/asset_packager>

------
petervandijck
To summarize, they went from 7 seconds to 2.5 seconds (still way too long);
mainly by putting the 40-ish images that they have on the page on a CDN.

