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.
