Postings
Speedy Web
With Google incorporating a “website speed” factor into site rankings, it has created renewed interests in rendering performance of web sites/apps. As a techie who has spent most of her career around web app delivery & performance, I’d like to highlight some (known) techniques and offer a few insights.
Browser-Side Optimization
Steve Souder identified 14 rules in his book for optimizing the performance of any given web page:
- Make Fewer HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Add an Expires Header
- Gzip Components
- Put Stylesheets at the Top
- Put Scripts at the Bottom
- Avoid CSS Expressions
- Make JavaScript and CSS External
- Reduce DNS Lookups
- Minify JavaScript
- Avoid Redirects
- Remove Duplicates Scripts
- Configure ETags
- Make Ajax Cacheable
These rules are primarily focused on reducing the impact of bandwidth, network latency, and the rendering of html/javascript/css.
Server-Side Optimization
As web applications become more complex and database-driven, a sluggish backend may completely negate any performance gains from client-side optimization. Back in 2003 when I managed the World Health Organization’s website, we employed a CMS tool that published all the content in static html. This allowed us to deliver a large quantity of (frequently updated) content without needing to scale out the CMS to handle millions of requests. (more…)
Filed under: httpd,web X.0 — appgirl @ 10:57 amComments (1)
httpd: accelerate web page performance with mod_expires
More and more goodies are packaged with apache2, allowing one to perform front-end engineering right out of the box. Here are a tip on using mod_expires to maximize the use of browser cache and accelerate performance for repeat visitors. (more…)
Filed under: httpd — appgirl @ 7:45 pmComments (0)
Making the case for a virtualized hardware appliance
As Data Center infrastructures become more virtualized, the desire for virtualized network services increases. We see 2 types of offerings:
- virtual appliances delivered in a VM image, such as the Netscaler VPX from Citrix
- hardware appliances that can be virtualized, such as Cisco ACE or ASA
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