08 August 2007

Back! Random web optimizations.

Wow, that's a long time since my last entry. Just gonna dive right in and continue.

Anyway, been using using Firebug for ages, and now combined with YSlow, I've finally been looking at the performance numbers for some sites and web apps we have. A few interesting tidbits:
  • Apache Bench not that useful at showing real browser experience. Too many pages have external requests that take forever to load. Firebug's "Net" information is more useful in tracking down bottlenecks. YSlow would take that information and tell you where things suck.

  • Just bite the CPU load hit and enable transparent deflate compression on Apache. It's worth it. The network bandwidth is a lot more of a bottleneck than CPU processing is.
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript

  • Drupal 5.x can automagically concat its many .css together. No need to muck around. Admin - Site Config - Performance - Aggregate and compress CSS files. Too bad it does not handle the nonconformant themes' css.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't think folk use ab to test real world browser experience. There is too much happening on the client side to be able to measure that accurately using server-side only tools.

The benefit of ab is that it is a quick and easy way to gauge system latency, especially in distributed (web) systems.

Ditesh

Anonymous said...

Welcome back. Hopefully you will stay longer this time.

LowKS