Workshop: High Performance Webpages
Date: Sunday, 4/15/2007
Presenters: Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer, Yahoo!

This is my first set of notes from O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo. The workshop was “High Performance Webpages,” a dense, three-hour session with two leads on Yahoo!’s front-end optimization team (Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer.) This team has done some solid work breaking down the best practices for making a website speedy and responsive.

The presentation also advocated for optimization from the point of view of the user. Distinguishing between “response-time” optimization (request to page load) and “efficiency” optimization (minimization of resource use), the team made a very strong case that the latter optimization is premature. Having access to Yahoo!’s server logs, they have collected a large body of data that suggests that for rich sites like ours, 80%-90% of the user’s response time is eaten up by the client.

On a side note, I think Yahoo! has done the developer community a huge service by making all of this information public. This effort is part and parcel with their open-source release of the YUI toolkit. I’ve just added the YUI blog to my RSS reader.

The full set of rough notes are after the jump. These include empirical data on a number of experiments that the team conducted around frontend performance, as well as a distilled set of 14 best practices for speeding up a web application.

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There haven’t been any posts in months, but I’m going to be resurrecting mindtangle.

However, the content of my posts is going to shift. For months, I’ve been planning on starting a new blog to keep public notes on work-related frontend development. At the same time, all of my old interests (snapshot of the current tag cloud, at right) endure, and maybe those topics will start appearing here, again.

Logan and gknot are still authors on this blog. We’ll see if new activity will inspire them to start writing again. Otherwise, we’re going get a little low on pop culture and doomsaying.

Another change: I’m no longer going to blog “anonymously,” though it probably wouldn’t have been difficult to figure out who I was, before. I’ve recently started a new job at Instructables, and it will be useful for me to write as the UI developer for that specific context, rather than as Joe Random Blogger.

Next up: notes from a few sessions of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, here in San Francisco. Instructables got a handful of passes, since O’Reilly’s Alpha Tech Ventures provided us with our seed capital.