The performance culture has changed drastically since it’s early beginning. Notifying everyone of it’s important isn’t important anymore because everyone knows that it is important. Through events like Velocity, the word has gotten out to the mass that performance matters. It matters to the business and the users.
As people are becoming aware of web performance, more questions are raised as how to implement a culture of performance in the industry. To answer that, some companies are integrating web performance team into their workforce. The web performance team is usually tasked with scavenging the web application and finding ways to improve performance. “They investigate and keep tabs on the total number of HTTP requests, the total byte size of various types of assets, and measure latency. They look at endless amount of charts to figure out what’s going and maybe even have automated testing that tracks YSlow or PageSpeed scores. They file bugs against other developers to fix bottlenecks. They investigate CDN usage and opportunities for tuning.” Although the web team is responsible for the performance of the company, it is more than just the responsibility of a subset of developers. To integrate a web performance culture into the workplace more people have to be involved.
A web application developer has the role of adding new features. In turn, adding more code to the product tends to make it slower. In another part of the company, there’s a performance team whose job it is to focus on speed. By understanding how each aspect fits into a product, developing a performance culture will help ensure the highest quality all around.
Read more at http://bit.ly/1gGHHKw
GoDaddy Web Hosting Upgrades Increase Performance & Reliability
Microsoft, Paralles, and GoDaddy teamed up together to create Windows-based hosting. the new web hosting has an improved user interface, better stability, and enhanced performance.
Although Parallels is a small company compared to Godaddy and Microsoft, Parallels specializes in virtualization and automation solutions for desktops, servers, hosting, SaaS and more. Parallels mission is to help web professionals by simplifying complex tasks such as managing databases and configuring domain names.
By teaming up with Paralles and Microsoft, Godaddy’s new corporate strategy will focus on their product development to help small business owners and entrepreneurs grow online by leveraging Windows Server 2012. GoDaddy hopes that by leveraging the Windows server, customers will see more benefits in world-class storage, networking, and performance.
“There’s an old adage in technology, when buying a new product, you can choose two of the following three – speed, reliability and affordability,” said GoDaddy Senior Vice President and General Manager Hosting Jeff King. “That isn’t the case with our new Windows Web hosting – with GoDaddy, you can have all three. The product takes the stability of Windows Server 2012, adds it to our hyper-fast Web hosting infrastructure and is easy to use thanks to Parallels Plesk Panel. This is a big step forward, but it’s only the beginning … watch this space, we’re just getting started.”
Not only is GoDaddy placing an emphasis on business owners and entrepreneurs, they are also expanding their hosting platform across 60 countries in 30 different languages. This gives global customers a better experience of managing a website.
Read more at http://bit.ly/1diYJJl
4chan Prooves Small Things Add Up.
According to 4chan founder Chris Hates, “Page performance has always been important to me for two big reasons: 1) I browse 4chan daily and can’t stand slow websites (especially one I control!), and 2) the site is both operated on a shoe-string budget and quite large, so even small changes that result in savings are worth investigating. To that end, we’ve done our best to adhere to best practices.”
If you’re not familiar with 4chan, the website is one of the most popular imageboard websites. The anonymity of the website makes it easier for users to post their content for others to see without being tracked because no profile or screen name is required. Web users would describe 4chan as the underbelly of the internet, where the lowest of the lowest common denominator of humor is found.
Nonetheless, without registering with a username, users feel more secure and proactive to making a post or comment. The average page may have 125 or so of these links, and the difference in page size between the two is around ~50 bytes compressed. The results of 4chan using YSlow and PageSpeed, showed their static content being served from a cookied domain resulting in adding unnecessary request overhead.
Large sites load static content from special domains for a few reasons, but primarily to reduce request overhead, and sometimes security. So we recently switched over from 4chan.org to 4cdn.org, resulting in small and large benefits.
The small benefits came 4chan had the option of choosing between a longer domain (ie. images.4chan-cdn.org) and a shorter one (ie. i.4cdn.org). “50 bytes may not seem like a lot, but when you’re serving 500 million pageviews per month, it adds up. This small change will save us about 23 gigabytes of transfer per month, and ~275 GB over the course of a year.” said Chris Poole.
The larger savings will be seen by the users. Despite doing the best to minimize cookies, 4chan use of Google Analytics puts the average user’s cookie size around 1 kilobyte. “Because these cookies are sent with every request made to content hosted on 4chan.org, the average user must send 4chan roughly 100 KB of data per page load to receive the response. On mobile networks this can be frustrating for users with data caps or for users who have a slow internet provider.
“Since moving over to their new domain, end users now save close to 100 KB upstream per page load, which at 500 million page views per month adds up to 46 terabytes per month in savings for our users. I find this unreal.”
Read more at http://bit.ly/1coHVPe