Google has launched a new site that promotes the use of techniques to make web pages load faster. The site shares some of the tools and ideas that are used within Google to optimize its own web sites.
The article on caching uses HttpWatch to show the difference in performance when the Expires header has been correctly set:
Our blog post ‘Test Drive of the Google Hosted Ajax Libraries‘ looked at using Google’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve up commonly used libraries such as jQuery and Prototype.
One significant advantage, that we found, was that downloading a library from a different hostname (i.e. ajax.googleapis.com) helps to avoid the HTTP connection limiting behavior that [...]
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 [...]