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Improve Web Page Performance
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Princeton
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Joe Velez began developing for the web in 1998. He is an avid vBulletin user and volunteers his services as a vbulletin.org administrator. He currently spends his time maintaining and developing allnurses.com.

Vineland, NJ
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Princeton Princeton is offline 09-14-2009, 10:00 PM

Competition is increasing on the Web. If your site is slow you will lose to your competitors. To improve web page performance (speed), you can do a number of things:
  1. increase number of servers
  2. tweak your server(s)
  3. modify your web pages
This article will focus on modifying your web pages to increase performance.

As you are aware, today's browsers are faster than earlier versions. They have changed functionality to help improve speed. By understanding how browsers function, you will be able to increase your web page performance.

Learn everything that you can about browser functionality....
http://www.browserscope.org/ is a great resource that charts how different browsers function.

The Easiest Thing You Can Do To Improve Web Page Performance:
  1. Use less <tables> - if a product requires you to wrap large chunks of code within a <table> you should think twice about it
  2. Remove unnecessary objects, features, and plugins.
  3. Reuse static files across multiple domains. eg. images, css, js, etc
  4. Use less javascript - if a product requires additional javascript you should think twice about it; javascript blocks everything from loading (in parallel) until completely loaded and processed
Javascript blocks other files from downloading - It also needs time from processing. So, the less you have the faster your speed.



Read more about how <tables> affect speed...
How Design Affects Performance : Progressive Rendering

Additional information...
How Design Affects Performance

Increase Download Parallelization - Use A CDN Such As Amazon S3:

Increase download parallelization by increasing the number of resources that serves static files. In other words, if you have many static objects* on a page split them across multiple domains.

*static files - includes stylesheets, images, swf, etc

The reason why this works is because each browser allows a maximum number of connections per hostname. In modern browsers, this number has increased to 6 (avg). What this means is that your browser will try to download 6 objects from any hostname at the same time. So if you increase the number of resources that serve static files it's more likely that you will decrease page display time.

In comparison, older browsers such as IE 6 only allowed 2 maximum connections per hostname.

Move all your static files to a CDN such as Amazon S3. Doing so will provide you with the following:
  1. decrease server load
  2. decrease bandwidth
  3. decrease cost
  4. decrease page display time
Get yourself an S3 account ASAP!

I recommend using a different domain other than your site domain. The reason behind this is that you don't want your cookies associated with each static file.
  1. There's no need to associate cookies with static files.
  2. Some cookies can be as long as 1k which will increase your time.
the following image is a snapshot of the headers of a downloaded image...



Getting Started

I elect to use .info domain for static files as they are offered on the cheap - $1.99.

For example, if your site domain is domain.com ; you should purchase domain-file.info to serve your static files.

(Note: It can be any domain just as long as it's different from your site.)

Setting Up Your Domain

Once you get your domain you can point it to your amazon s3 server account (url). This is done by adding a CNAME entry for each sub-domain that you want to create.

I created the following sub-domains:
  • js.domain-file.info to serve javascript files
  • css.domain-file.info to serve stylesheets
  • img.domain-file.info to serve images
  • img2.domain-file.info to serve images
  • icons.domain-file.info to serve icons if you have a large amount of icons
To upload files, I highly recommend using a commercial product called Bucket Explorer. There is a free Firefox extension, S3Fox Organizer, that provides a GUI interface but it lacks a lot of features.

Whatever you use - make sure that you can alter headers.

You will need to add EXPIRES header so that the static files are cached - saving you bandwidth and decreasing overall page display time.

Other Things You Can Do To Speed Up Your Pages (in no particular order):
  • combine javascript (to decrease http request)
  • move javascript to the <head> or to the footer (below any content)
  • decrease number of inline javascript
  • combine css (to decrease http request)
  • combine images using sprites (to decrease http request)
  • load css prior to any javascript calls
  • compress images
Compress Javascript & Stylesheets:

To further decrease page display time, I recommend compressing (gzip) your js and css files. You will then have to create a plugin to show the gzip version if browser is capable of displaying if not show the uncompressed version.

Most modern browsers are capable of displaying compressed files. However, IE6 is known to have some issues - yes, even the SP2 which was reported to have this fixed is still buggy.

Tools To Help You Get Started
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  #12  
Old 11-04-2009, 08:46 PM
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Brandon Sheley Brandon Sheley is offline
 
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Great article Joe, thanks for sharing
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  #13  
Old 11-04-2009, 11:00 PM
porcupine73 porcupine73 is offline
 
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Yes thanks for the article. I hadn't heard of some of these tools that are available. It is interesting to see the suggestions from YSlow. There's a number of things I can fix right away just by using the EXPIRES header information.

I'm pressed between using my current server as my content server hosting the subdomains or separate domains for imgs/css/js/etc., since it several times the bandwidth, storage, and processor power than I am currently using. Or maybe just going with AWS.
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  #14  
Old 11-06-2009, 12:02 AM
porcupine73 porcupine73 is offline
 
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So I was playing around with YSlow today and made some progress on improvements. Having some issues getting .js and some .css to compress with gzip but this is in Windoze.

I made a quick plug-in and hooked it as the last thing on global_start to swap out some of my images and other content to my subdomain CDN's. Not sure if my approach is correct but it seems to making YSlow happier anyway:

Code:
$oz_process = str_replace('"http://ozscience.com/forums/clientscript/', '"http://cdn8.ozscience.net/clientscript/', $output);
$oz_process = str_replace('"clientscript/', '"http://cdn8.ozscience.net/clientscript/', $oz_process);
// $oz_process = str_replace('"http://ozscience.com/common/', '"http://cdn8.ozscience.net/common/', $oz_process);
$oz_process = str_replace('"http://ozscience.com/forums/images/', '"http://cdn9.ozscience.net/images/', $oz_process);
$output = str_replace('"/forums/images/', '"http://cdn9.ozscience.net/images/', $oz_process);
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  #15  
Old 11-06-2009, 12:45 PM
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Scalemotorcars Scalemotorcars is offline
 
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Here's some online JS and CSS compressors using the very popular YUI Compressor.

This one is JS only
http://yui.2clics.net/

This one is both
http://refresh-sf.com/yui/

:up:
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  #16  
Old 11-12-2009, 12:31 AM
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abdobasha2004 abdobasha2004 is offline
 
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wow
thanks for sharing
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  #17  
Old 11-19-2009, 12:56 AM
porcupine73 porcupine73 is offline
 
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Just wondering, did you guys serve your static files through Cloudfront, or directly through S3? Thanks.
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  #18  
Old 02-21-2010, 11:37 AM
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So from this article, is my understanding correct, that I should store all forum images (i.e those in the template) on a different host.

How do I configure vBulletin to automatically store user images (i.e. uploads, attachments, avatars, etc) on a different server automatically?
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Old 03-05-2010, 04:24 AM
afx1 afx1 is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by porcupine73 View Post
I made a quick plug-in and hooked it as the last thing on global_start to swap out some of my images and other content to my subdomain CDN's. Not sure if my approach is correct but it seems to making YSlow happier anyway:
i think you meant global_complete. thanks for the tip
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  #20  
Old 04-10-2010, 11:39 PM
PlusVB PlusVB is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Scalemotorcars View Post
Here's some online JS and CSS compressors using the very popular YUI Compressor.

This one is JS only
http://yui.2clics.net/

This one is both
http://refresh-sf.com/yui/

:up:
There is even offline Compressor for Windows.



http://yuilibrary.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=94&t=91

Nice article BTW
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  #21  
Old 05-13-2010, 04:07 PM
Kwikms Kwikms is offline
 
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Quote:
You will need to add EXPIRES header so that the static files are cached - saving you bandwidth and decreasing overall page display time.
How do you set the expire header? What time do you suggest?
Is it like this? x-amz-meta-expires:HTTP date or like this x-amz-meta-expires:10000

What about Cache-Control?
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