December 18th, 2007
Speed Up Your Web Site With Firebug and YSlow
I recently convinced a friend that the Firebug plug-in for Mozilla FireFox is an essential development tool. Well, it’s now time for me to praise YSlow, an extension to Firebug provided by Yahoo!, that analyses your web site, and recommends how to improve performance in the way of download speed. So if you want to learn how to speed up your web site, read on.
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Some interesting ideas, particularly the use of HTTP Expires Headers.
I wonderif whitespace in js and css files be taken care of by gzip compression (if your host allows it)?
Also, does reducing the number of requests speed up the site? I thought that multiple requests (executed concurrently) would not take any longer.
Oh, and the link to ‘my company website’ is to yslow instead :(
Now tell that to the rest of the bloated crap on the internet :-)
Judging by the CSS and JS files viewable in FireBug, I don’t think that whitepsace is actually stripped away, but it would be compressed. ‘Packing’ such files before placing them on the server would have the beenefit of require less process deflating and inflating.
Browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections. IE (ghasp) actually follows the spec (RFC) and limits HTTP 1.1 to 2 simultaneous connections. See connections. Firefox’s about:config show 8 max connections and 2 max persistent connections. I guess persistent is for HTTP 1.1/keep. alive. Opera used to be set to 8, but I’ve not used it for a while.
Link updated. Cheers Alun
Nice work Howie!
The work website I am involved in (you know it) used to buckle under peak loads of around 80,000 users in a 15 minute period.
After some relatively simple optimisation, we can now successfully serve 160,000 and counting – we’ve yet to see our new limit (or generate it from load-testing).
That was simply combining css / js files, reviewing cache-control directives, removing unnecessary images and tidying up crappy html.
Other suggestions at the time ranged from getting a bigger pipe (this wouldn’t have helped) to using Akamai.
Are the two weeks up yet, is it too late?