July 8, 2008
The recently announced Google Ajax Libraries API caught our attention because it offers some significant performance improvements if you use a popular Javascript library (e.g. JQuery, prototype, script_aculo_us, MooTools or dojo) on your site. You can now reference these libraries at Google rather than having to host your own copy. The benefits of this approach are:
The libraries […]
May 14, 2008
If you’re tuning a web page’s performance there are two types of visitors that you need to be concerned about:
A new visitor to your site who won’t have any of your pages, scripts, CSS or images in their browser cache.
An existing user of your site who will have your cacheable pages, scripts, CSS or images in […]
April 30, 2008
Have you ever been to a web site and seen this?
This warning is triggered in IE if it is displaying a secure HTTPS page that has caused a non-secure (i.e. HTTP based) resource to be downloaded. The message box doesn’t allow the user to control whether the non-secure content should be downloaded, only whether it should be displayed.
This […]
February 27, 2008
If you build, maintain or tune web sites you’ll know about the browser cache and how to control caching using HTTP response headers. We’ve talked about caching in several previous posts.
However, you may not be aware that IE uses two caches for holding images. First, there is the regular browser cache that keeps a copy […]
January 18, 2008
Web developers are becoming more aware of the performance penalties of page bloat and as we covered in our previous posts there are ways to mitigate this, compression being just one.
However, one of the causes of poor performance that is often overlooked is the transmission time taken to upload data to the server. Although, HTTP request […]
December 10, 2007
In practice, you only need two settings to optimize caching:
Don’t cache HTML
Cache everything else forever
“Wooah…hang on!”, we hear you say. “Cache all my scripts and images forever?“
Yes, that’s right. You don’t need anything else in between. Caching indefinitely is fine as long as you don’t allow your HTML to be cached.
“But what about if I […]