PUBLIC MARKS with tag performance

Although we are not comparing apples to apples, Gentoo did out-perform Ubuntu in almost every test, and sometimes by a fair margin. It does appear that optimizing for a specific CPU can yield a decent performance increase.

Of course, Gentoo offers benefits in other areas with their USE flags and being able to build a highly customized system. The question is whether the amount of time it takes is worth the benefit, and that’s a personal choice.

A quick survey shows that seven of the Alexa U.S. top ten web sites have a SCRIPT tag above their stylesheets or STYLE blocks: AOL, Facebook, Google, Bing, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!. These web sites don’t currently use @font-face, but if they did, they would experience the IE blocked rendering problem. This raises the concern that other web sites that are early adopters of @font-face have a SCRIPT tag above @font-face and their IE users run the risk of experiencing blocked rendering.

Most web pages include resources that change infrequently, such as CSS files, image files, JavaScript files, and so on. These resources take time to download over the network, which increases the time it takes to load a web page. HTTP caching allows these resources to be saved, or cached, by a browser or proxy. Once a resource is cached, a browser or proxy can refer to the locally cached copy instead of having to download it again on subsequent visits to the web page. Thus caching is a double win: you reduce round-trip time by eliminating numerous HTTP requests for the required resources, and you substantially reduce the total payload size of the responses. Besides leading to a dramatic reduction in page load time for subsequent user visits, enabling caching can also significantly reduce the bandwidth and hosting costs for your site.

What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine? We invite you to join us in exploring and innovating across the entire spectrum of performance - from Internet protocols to the browser to website development. Together, let's make the web faster!

tracking Aptimize for about a year since they contacted me about their Website Accelerator. I was psyched to have them present at and sponsor Velocity. Website Accelerator changes web pages in real time and injects many of the performance best practices from my books, plus some others that aren’t in my books. It’s a server-side module that runs on Microsoft Sharepoint, ASP.NET, and Linux/Apache.