Web Performance Daybook

by Stefanov, Stoyan

• ISBN13: 9781449332914
• ISBN10: 1449332919
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-06-27
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

Performance is critical to the success of any website. In this book, web performance experts including Steve Souders, Tom Hughes-Croucher, Nicholas Zakas, and Stoyan Stefanov offer a collection of practical tips, techniques, and advice to help you optimize your site's user experience. These articles originally appeared on an online performance calendar that received much attention and use among members of the web development community. Now, this curated wisdom is available in this handy guide to help you squeeze every ounce of performance from your site-whether you're a web developer, mobile developer, or web designer. Gain proven techniques for cutting response times Learn from leading experts including Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, Estelle Weyl and many more Obtain a forward by Steve Souders, performance expert and bestselling author of High Performance Web Sites

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xi
From the Editor	p. xiii
About the Authors	p. xv
Preface	p. xxvii
WebPagetest Internals	p. 1
Function Interception	p. 2
Code Injection	p. 2
Resulting Browser Architecture	p. 3
Get the Code	p. 4
Browser Advancements	p. 4
IocalStorage Read Performance	p. 5
The Benchmark	p. 6
What's Going On?	p. 6
Optimization Strategy	p. 7
Follow Up	p. 8
Why Inlining Everything Is NOT the Answer	p. 11
No Browser Caching	p. 11
No Edge Caching	p. 12
No Loading On-Demand	p. 13
Invalidates Browser Look-Ahead	p. 14
Flawed Solution: Inline Everything only on First Visit	p. 14
Summary and Recommendations	p. 15
The Art and Craft of the Async Snippet	p. 17
The Facebook Plug-ins JS SDK	p. 17
Design Goals	p. 19
The Snippet	p. 19
Appending Alternatives	p. 21
Whew!	p. 22
What's Missing?	p. 22
First Parties	p. 22
Parting Words: On the Shoulders of Giants	p. 23
Carrier Networks: Down the Rabbit Hole	p. 25
Variability	p. 25
Latency	p. 26
Transcoding	p. 26
Gold in Them There Hills	p. 27
4G Won't Save Us	p. 28
Where Do We Go from Here?	p. 28
Light at the End of the Tunnel	p. 28
The Need for Parallelism in HTTP	p. 31
Introduction: Falling Down the Stairs	p. 31
Current Best Practices: Working around HTTP	p. 32
Experiment: Mining the HTTP Archive	p. 33
Results: Serialization Abounds	p. 34
Recommendations: Time to Fix the Protocols	p. 34
Automating Website Performance	p. 37
FrontendSPOF in Beijing	p. 39
Business Insider	p. 39
CNET	p. 40
O'Reilly Radar	p. 42
The Cause of Frontend SPOF	p. 43
Avoiding Frontend SPOF	p. 44
Call to Action	p. 44
All about YSlow	p. 47
Secrets of High Performance Native Mobile Applications	p. 51
Keep an Eye on Your Waterfalls	p. 52
Compress Those Resources	p. 53
Don't Download the Same Content Twice	p. 53
Can Too Much Adriana Lima Slow You Down?	p. 54
Epilogue	p. 55
Pure CSS3 Images? Hmm, Maybe Later	p. 57
The Challenge	p. 57
Getting My Hands Dirty with CSS3 Cooking	p. 57
Cross-Browser Results	p. 58
Benchmarking	p. 59
Payload	p. 59
Rendering	p. 60
Are We There Yet?	p. 62
Appendix: Code Listings	p. 63
HTML	p. 64
CSS	p. 65
Useless Downloads of Background Images in Android	p. 71
The Android Problem	p. 71
And the Lack of Solution	p. 72
Timing the Web	p. 73
Conclusion	p. 77
I See HTTP	p. 79
Some details	p. 79
Walkthrough	p. 79
Todos	p. 83
The Road Ahead	p. 88
All I Want for Christmas	p. 90
Using Intelligent Caching to Avoid the Bot Performance Tax	p. 95
A Practical Guide to the Navigation Timing API	p. 99
Why You Should Care	p. 99
Collecting Navigation Timing Timestamps and Turning Them into Useful Measurements	p. 100
Using Google Analytics as a Performance Data Warehouse	p. 100
Reporting on Performance in Google Analytics	p. 101
Limitations	p. 101
Final Thoughts	p. 102
How Response Times Impact Business	p. 103
Mobile UI Performance Considerations	p. 107
Battery Life	p. 107
Latency	p. 108
Embedding CSS and JS: A Best Practice?	p. 108
Memory	p. 110
Optimize Images	p. 111
Weigh the Benefits of CSS	p. 112
GPU Benefits and Pitfalls	p. 112
Viewport: Out of Sight Does Not Mean Out of Mind	p. 113
Minimize the DOM	p. 113
UI Responsiveness	p. 113
Summary	p. 114
Stop Wasting Your Time Using the Google Analytics Site Speed Report	p. 115
Problem: A Bug in Firefox Implementation of the Navigation Timing API	p. 115
Solution: Filter Out the Firefox Timings in Google Analytics	p. 116
Good News: The Bug Was Fixed in Firefox 9	p. 116
Closing Remark	p. 116
Beyond Web Developer Tools: Strace	p. 119
What About Other Platforms?	p. 119
Getting Started	p. 120
Zeroing In	p. 120
Example: Local Storage	p. 120
We've Only Scratched the Surface	p. 121
Introducing mod_spdy: A SPDY Module for the Apache HTTP Server	p. 123
Getting Started with mod_spdy	p. 123
SPDY and Apache	p. 123
Help to Improve mod_spdy	p. 124
Lazy Evaluation of CommonJS Modules	p. 127
Close Encounters of the Text/JavaScript Type	p. 127
Lazy Loading	p. 128
Lazy Evaluation to the Rescue	p. 129
Building Lazy Evaluation into CommonJS Modules	p. 130
Advice on Trusting Advice	p. 133
Why You're Probably Reading Your Performance Measurement Results Wrong (At Least You're in Good Company)	p. 137
The Methodology	p. 138
The Results	p. 138
Conclusions	p. 139
Why Does This Matter?	p. 139
Takeaways	p. 139
Lossy Image Compression	p. 141
Lossy Compression	p. 142
Performance Testing with Selenium and JavaScript	p. 145
Recording Data	p. 145
Collecting and Analyzing the Data	p. 147
Sample Results	p. 148
Benefits	p. 149
Closing Words	p. 149
Credits	p. 149
A Simple Way to Measure Website Performance	p. 151
Concept	p. 151
Advantages	p. 152
Limitation	p. 152
Conclusion	p. 153
Beyond Bandwidth: Ul Performance	p. 155
Introduction	p. 155
After the Page Loads: The UI Layer	p. 155
UI Profilers	p. 156
CSS Stress Test	p. 156
CSS Profilers	p. 157
CSS Lint	p. 157
DOM Monster	p. 158
Perception of Speed	p. 158
Tidbits	p. 159
Call for a Focus on UI Performance	p. 159
CSS Selector Performance Has Changed! (For the Better)	p. 161
Style Sharing	p. 162
Rule Hashes	p. 162
Ancestor Filters	p. 162
Fast Path	p. 163
What Is It Still Slow?	p. 163
Losing Your Head with PhantomJS and confess.js	p. 165
Performance Summaries	p. 165
App Cache Manifest	p. 167
Onward and Upward	p. 168
Measure Twice, Cut Once	p. 169
Identifying Pages/Sections	p. 170
Identifying Features	p. 171
Optimizing	p. 171
When Good Backends Go Bad	p. 173
What Is a Good Backend Time?	p. 174
Figuring Out What Is Going On	p. 175
Fixing It	p. 178
Finally	p. 179
Web Font Performance: Weighing @font-face Options and Alternatives	p. 181
Font Hosting Services Versus Rolling Your Own	p. 181
What the FOUT?	p. 182
Removing Excess Font Glyphs	p. 183
JavaScript Font Loaders	p. 184
Introducing Boot.getFont: A Fast and Tiny Web Font Loader	p. 185
Gentlefonts, Start Your Engines!	p. 186
My Observations	p. 190
Final Thoughts	p. 191
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