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High Performance Web Sites
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Steve Souders
O'Reilly Media, Paperback, Published September 2007, 138 pages, ISBN 0596529309
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Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% 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.

Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to:

  • Make Fewer HTTP Requests


  • Use a Content Delivery Network


  • Add an Expires Header


  • Gzip Components


  • Move Stylesheets at the Top


  • Move Scripts to 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


If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting their site, this book is indispensable.

"If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be a dramatically better place. Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's really no excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore."

-Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM Inspector

"Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance."

-Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation

 

 

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

A. The Importance of Frontend Performance
Tracking Web Page Performance
Where Does the Time Go?
The Performance Golden Rule

B. HTTP Overview
Compression
Conditional GET Requests
Expires
Keep-Alive
There's More

1. Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Image Maps
CSS Sprites
Inline Images
Combined Scripts and Stylesheets
Conclusion

2. Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Networks
The Savings

3. Rule 3: Add an Expires Header
Expires Header
Max-Age and mod_expires
Empty Cache vs. Primed Cache
More Than Just Images
Revving Filenames
Examples

4. Rule 4: Gzip Components
How Compression Works
What to Compress
The Savings
Configuration
Proxy Caching
Edge Cases
Gzip in Action

5. Rule 5: Put Stylesheets at the Top
Progressive Rendering
sleep.cgi
Blank White Screen
Flash of Unstyled Content
What's a Frontend Engineer to Do?

6. Rule 6: Put Scripts at the Bottom
Problems with Scripts
Parallel Downloads
Scripts Block Downloads
Worst Case: Scripts at the Top
Best Case: Scripts at the Bottom
Putting It in Perspective

7. Rule 7: Avoid CSS Expressions
Updating Expressions
Working Around the Problem
Conclusion

8. Rule 8: Make JavaScript and CSS External
Inline vs. External
Typical Results in the Field
Home Pages
The Best of Both Worlds

9. Rule 9: Reduce DNS Lookups
DNS Caching and TTLs
The Browser's Perspective
Reducing DNS Lookups

10. Rule 10: Minify JavaScript
Minification
Obfuscation
The Savings
Examples
Icing on the Cake

11. Rule 11: Avoid Redirects
Types of Redirects
How Redirects Hurt Performance
Alternatives to Redirects

12. Rule 12: Remove Duplicate Scripts
Duplicate Scripts-They Happen
Duplicate Scripts Hurt Performance
Avoiding Duplicate Scripts

13. Rule 13: Configure ETags
What's an ETag?
The Problem with ETags
ETags: Use 'Em or Lose 'Em
ETags in the Real World

14. Rule 14: Make Ajax Cacheable
Web 2.0, DHTML, and Ajax
Asynchronous = Instantaneous?
Optimizing Ajax Requests
Caching Ajax in the Real World

15. Deconstructing 10 Top Sites
Page Weight, Response Time, YSlow Grade
How the Tests Were Done
Amazon
AOL
CNN
eBay
Google
MSN
MySpace
Wikipedia
Yahoo!
YouTube

Index




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