High Performance Web Sites
by Souders, SteveFormat: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2007-09-01
Publisher(s): Oreilly & Associates Inc
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Summary
Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.
Author Biography
Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with more than 1 million downloads. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference sponsored by O'Reilly. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and he frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.
Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Preface | p. xiii |
| The Importance of Frontend Performance | p. 1 |
| Tracking Web Page Performance | p. 1 |
| Where Does the Time Go? | p. 3 |
| The Performance Golden Rule | p. 4 |
| HTTP Overview | p. 6 |
| Compression | p. 7 |
| Conditional GET Requests | p. 7 |
| Expires | p. 8 |
| Keep-Alive | p. 8 |
| There's More | p. 9 |
| Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests | p. 10 |
| Image Maps | p. 10 |
| CSS Sprites | p. 11 |
| Inline Images | p. 13 |
| Combined Scripts and Stylesheets | p. 15 |
| Conclusion | p. 16 |
| Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network | p. 18 |
| Content Delivery Networks | p. 19 |
| The Savings | p. 20 |
| Rule 3: Add an Expires Header | p. 22 |
| Expires Header | p. 22 |
| Max-Age and mod_expires | p. 23 |
| Empty Cache vs. Primed Cache | p. 24 |
| More Than Just Images | p. 25 |
| Revving Filenames | p. 27 |
| Examples | p. 28 |
| Rule 4: Gzip Components | p. 29 |
| How Compression Works | p. 29 |
| What to Compress | p. 30 |
| The Savings | p. 31 |
| Configuration | p. 31 |
| Proxy Caching | p. 33 |
| Edge Cases | p. 34 |
| Gzip in Action | p. 35 |
| Rule 5: Put Stylesheets at the Top | p. 37 |
| Progressive Rendering | p. 37 |
| Sleep.cgi | p. 38 |
| Blank White Screen | p. 39 |
| Flash of Unstyled Content | p. 43 |
| What's a Frontend Engineer to Do? | p. 43 |
| Rule 6: Put Scripts at the Bottom | p. 45 |
| Problems with Scripts | p. 45 |
| Parallel Downloads | p. 46 |
| Scripts Block Downloads | p. 48 |
| Worst Case: Scripts at the Top | p. 49 |
| Best Case: Scripts at the Bottom | p. 49 |
| Putting It in Perspective | p. 50 |
| Rule 7: Avoid CSS Expressions | p. 51 |
| Updating Expressions | p. 52 |
| Working Around the Problem | p. 52 |
| Conclusion | p. 54 |
| Rule 8: Make JavaScript and CSS External | p. 55 |
| Inline vs. External | p. 55 |
| Typical Results in the Field | p. 58 |
| Home Pages | p. 58 |
| The Best of Both Worlds | p. 59 |
| Rule 9: Reduce DNS Lookups | p. 63 |
| DNS Caching and TTLs | p. 63 |
| The Browser's Perspective | p. 66 |
| Reducing DNS Lookups | p. 68 |
| Rule 10: Minify JavaScript | p. 69 |
| Minification | p. 69 |
| Obfuscation | p. 70 |
| The Savings | p. 70 |
| Examples | p. 72 |
| Icing on the Cake | p. 73 |
| Rule 11: Avoid Redirects | p. 76 |
| Types of Redirects | p. 76 |
| How Redirects Hurt Performance | p. 77 |
| Alternatives to Redirects | p. 79 |
| Rule 12: Remove Duplicate Scripts | p. 85 |
| Duplicate Scripts-They Happen | p. 85 |
| Duplicate Scripts Hurt Performance | p. 86 |
| Avoiding Duplicate Scripts | p. 87 |
| Rule 13: Configure ETags | p. 89 |
| What's an ETag? | p. 89 |
| The Problem with ETags | p. 91 |
| ETags: Use 'Em or Lose 'Em | p. 93 |
| ETags in the Real World | p. 94 |
| Rule 14: Make Ajax Cacheable | p. 96 |
| Web 2.0, DHTML, and Ajax | p. 96 |
| Asynchronous = Instantaneous? | p. 98 |
| Optimizing Ajax Requests | p. 99 |
| Caching Ajax in the Real World | p. 99 |
| Deconstructing 10 Top Sites | p. 103 |
| Page Weight, Response Time, YSlow Grade | p. 103 |
| How the Tests Were Done | p. 105 |
| Amazon | p. 107 |
| AOL | p. 110 |
| CNN | p. 114 |
| eBay | p. 116 |
| p. 120 | |
| MSN | p. 123 |
| MySpace | p. 127 |
| Wikipedia | p. 130 |
| Yahoo! | p. 132 |
| YouTube | p. 135 |
| Index | p. 139 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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