I bring you a blog post I found today about performance testing and improvement, but first....

On this day in 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) becomes the first person to observe X-rays. Like most other tremendous breakthroughs, Rontgen's discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature.

X-rays are not useful to increase the performance of your web sites, but it sure would be helpful if we had a way to easily see inside our web system architecture to spot the bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Wouldn't it be cool to run a scan on a site and be able to quickly see a performance problem like the big bump on this guy's hand? Maybe that was Wilhelm's wedding ring. Or maybe he should have stopped cracking his knuckles when his mom told him to "quick that nasty habit!"

This blog was posted today and provides some quick suggestions for improving web site performance. How To Enhance The Online Performance Of Your Website by Kabir Bedi presents some basic tips that are useful.

Here is a summary of the key points:

• Identify Heavy Components - Kabir recommends eliminating large file sizes to decrease page load time. See the list of profiling tools below. He sets a target size of less than 25 KB.
• Use Appropriate Image Formats - I once had a client complaining about timeouts on a home page. When I analyzed it, there was a 2.5mb BMP image prominently displayed! You really should only use JPEG, GIF and PNG images.
• Compress CSS and JavaScript Documents - get rid of unnecessary characters like tabs, spaces, comments, etc. from the source code. A smaller size should speed up the download.
• Merge CSS and JavaScript Files - I have seen certain web applications (especially open source CMS) that can utilize 10-20 CSS files and over 50 JS files. It's inefficient bloat that hurts performance because it requires the server to process a request for every single file.
• Use CSS Sprites - in the same mode of request efficiency as above, Sprites are combinations of smaller images into one big image. Web-based tools are available that will combine multiple images into a sprite.

Kabir is a Indian web designer who works as a senior web consultant with LeXolution IT Services.