New Book: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In his new book Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.

Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:

• JavaScript - Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.


• Network - Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.


• Browser - Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.

About the Author

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. He is also co-chair of Velocity 2008, the first web performance conference sponsored by O'Reilly. He frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

20 New Rules for Faster Web Pages

Update: Nice explanation in The importance of bandwidth versus latency of how long latencies cause cascading delays in resource loading. Doloto tries to optimize how resources are loaded. Twenty new rules have been added to the original 14 rules for sizzling web performance. Part of scalability is worrying about performance too. The front-end is where 80-90% of end-user response time is spent and following these best practices improved the performance of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. The rules are divided into server, content, cookie, JavaScript, CSS, images, and mobile categories. The new rules are:

Flush the buffer early [server]

Use GET for AJAX requests [server]

Post-load components [content]

Preload components [content]

Reduce the number of DOM elements [content]

Split components across domains [content]

Minimize the number of iframes [content]

No 404s [content]

Reduce cookie size [cookie]

Use cookie-free domains for components [cookie]

Minimize DOM access [javascript]

Develop smart event handlers [javascript]

Choose <link> over @import [css]

Avoid filters [css]

Optimize images [images]

Optimize CSS sprites [images]

Don't scale images in HTML [images]

Make favicon.ico small and cacheable [images]

Keep components under 25K [mobile]

Pack components into a multipart document [mobile] Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.

Click to read more ...