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Optimizing Page Load Times

Posted by ryuzaki0 on

John Callender writes, "Google engineer Aaron Hopkins has written an interesting analysis of optimizing page load time. Hopkins simulated connections to a web page consisting of many small objects (HTML file, images, external javascript and CSS files, etc.), and looked at how things like browser settings and request size affect perceived performance. Among his findings: For web pages consisting of many small objects, performance often bottlenecks on upload speed, rather than download speed. Also, by spreading static content across four different hostnames, site operators can achieve dramatic improvements in perceived performance."

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. HTTP/1.1 Design by keithmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From TFA:

    By default, IE allows only two outstanding connections per hostname when talking to HTTP/1.1 servers or eight-ish outstanding connections total. Firefox has similar limits.

    And:

    If your users regularly load a dozen or more uncached or uncachable objects per page load, consider evenly spreading those objects over four hostnames. Due to browser oddness, this usually means your users can have 4x as many outstanding connections to you.

    From RFC 2616, section 8.1.4:

    Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy.

    It's not a browser quirk, it's specified behavior.

    1. Re:HTTP/1.1 Design by x2A · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Depends on server load; how many of the objects are static vs dynamic etc. 5-10 connections for images might be okay, but for dynamic objects it might not be. Perhaps it should be specifiable within the html page?

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  2. Caching of dynamic content by baadger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a good place to start testing the 'cacheability' of your dynamic web pages. Quite frankly it's appauling that even the big common web apps used today like most forum or blog scripts don't generate sensible Last-Modified, Vary, Expires, Cache-Control headers. With most of the metadata you need to generate this stuff stored in the existing database scheme theres just really no excuse for it.

    Abolishment of nasty long query strings into nicer, more memorable URI's is also something we should be seeing more of in "Web 2.0." Use mod_rewrite, you'll feel better for it.