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 29, 2008
Tip #1: Be Aware of PNG Limitations in Internet Explorer
The Portable Network Graphic (PNG) format is well supported by modern browsers (e.g. IE 6+, Firefox 1+ and Opera 5+), except for two issues with Internet Explorer:
Graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop save a Gamma correction table in the PNG file that is designed to allow for differences […]
May 16, 2008
There’s a post over on the Gmail blog by Wiltse Carpenter, the Tech Lead for Gmail Performance, about how they used HttpWatch and other tools to speed up the login for Gmail.
Here’s what they said about HttpWatch:
“The Httpwatch plug-in for Internet Explorer was one that proved easy to use and provided us with most of the […]
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 18, 2008
Web 2.0 is a term often used to describe next generation web sites that have moved beyond the simple page request->process->response cycle and are utilizing services on the web server to return data that can be rendered without making page transitions. The result is often a more responsive user interface that closely mimics a desktop application.
The […]
March 31, 2008
A common question we hear from our customers is “What is the Blocked time in HttpWatch and why are we seeing some much of it?”
The Blocked time in HttpWatch is shown as a gray block at the start of a request:
We measure this time by looking at the time interval between these two events:
The point […]