Archive for the ‘Performance’ category

Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess

May 23rd, 2011

Web performance is getting more and more attention from web developers and is one of the hottest topic in web development.

Fred Wilson considered it at 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps as the #1 principle for successful web apps.

First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it.

Faster website means more revenue and traffic
  • Amazon: 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales (source: Greg Linden, Amazon).
  • Google: 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches (source: Marrissa Mayer, Google).
  • Yahoo!: 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5–9% increase in the number of people who clicked “back” before the page even loaded (source: Nicole Sullivan, Yahoo!).

Google experiments reached similar results:

Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!

And speed is now a factor contributing to Google Page Rank:

Google, in their ongoing effort to make the Web faster, blogged last month that “we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.” This is yet another way in which improving web performance will have a positive impact on the bottom line.

The good news is that some of the most important speed optimizations can be easily done with simple .htaccess rules.
These rules can make any website faster by compressing content and enabling browser cache, and follow the Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site from Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team.

» Read more: Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess

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Maven Minify Plugin using YUI Compressor

June 11th, 2009

Following the previous article Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading, I implemented a similar solution as a Maven plugin.

This plugin combines and minimizes JavaScript and CSS files using YUI Compressor for faster page loading.

More details can be found on the Maven Minify Plugin page.

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Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading

May 25th, 2009

Reduce HTTP requests

On most sites, the major component of download time is not the base HTML file itself, but the number of subsequent HTTP requests to load the page’s supporting files – CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.
Each of those are extra HTTP requests, and each unique request takes a relatively long time.
The fewer requests to the server that the browser has to make, the faster the page will load.
There is an inherent overhead in each HTTP request. It takes substantially less time to serve one 60K file than it does three 20K files and a lot less than it does six 10K files.

Combine and minimize files

This post will explain how to combine and minimize CSS and JavaScript files using YUI Compressor and Ant.

This can be done by just concatenating all files into two combined files (one for CSS and one for JavaScript) and minimize them. You can quickly go from 10 or more files down to 2, and their size can be greatly reduced.

To keep the modularity that comes with splitting these files out by section (or business unit), keep them split in your development process, and combine them in your build process. A first Ant task will combine them and a second task will generate their minimized versions.

This technique has been successfully used in libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, etc, allowing developers to better organize their code.
» Read more: Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading

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Speed up your site by compressing and caching your content with .htaccess

January 6th, 2009

Update: Please read Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess for an updated version of this article.

.htaccess – gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving is one of the most popular posts on samaxes.
It’s basically on how to compress and cache your site content with Apache and .htaccess file.

It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me.
I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.

If you are lucky enough to have Apache 2 with your hosting provider you can use the mod_deflate module that comes bundled with it.

In order to compress your text files with this Apache’s module you just have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

<ifModule mod_deflate.c>
  <filesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>

This will gzip all your *.css, *.js, *.html, *.html, *.xhtml, and *.php files.
» Read more: Speed up your site by compressing and caching your content with .htaccess

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.htaccess – gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving

April 20th, 2008

Update: Please read Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess for an updated version of this article.

Last week I changed my hosting provider from Site5 to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
Despite the fact that the first one is faster than the second, NFSN is a lot more cheaper (I only pay for what I really use).

So in order to speed up my site and save bandwidth (the more I use the more I pay) I use .htaccess file to gzip my text based files and optimize cache HTTP headers.
Although this site is powered by WordPress which has some really great plugins to optimize PHP output I wanted a more generic solution which can be applied to all PHP web applications.

I also try to follow as much as I can the rules for high performance web sites so don’t be surprised if some Expires header seems too long (far future Expires header rule requires at least 172801 seconds).
» Read more: .htaccess – gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving

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J2EE cache filter

January 2nd, 2008

In my current web project I was having some performance issues, I needed a tool that allowed me to do some testing so I can see what’s wrong and what I can do better so my application perform faster.

My search lead me to High Performance Web Sites and YSlow, a very good talk by Steve Souders the Chief Performance Yahoo! at Yahoo!

YSlow is an easy-for-use plugin that allows you to inspect any web page just clicking a button.

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you:

  • Performance report card
  • HTTP/HTML summary
  • List of components in the page
  • Tools including JSLint

A good way to reduce the number of Http Connections required to load a web page is to store images and other resources in the browser cache.

Expires is a HTTP header that allows you to define when a resource (image, css, javascript, …) will need to be reloaded. It is a String representation of a Date in the format EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss z.
Cache-Control response headers give Web publishers more control over their content and address the limitations of Expires.

To correctly produce these headers I implemented a Java cache filter.
Using the cache filter is very simple. Grab it here and configure your web.xml, here’s an example:

<filter>
    <filter-name>imagesCache</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.samaxes.filter.CacheFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>privacy</param-name>
        <param-value>public</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>expirationTime</param-name>
        <param-value>2592000</param-value><!-- 30 days -->
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter>
    <filter-name>cssCache</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.samaxes.filter.CacheFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>privacy</param-name>
        <param-value>public</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>expirationTime</param-name>
        <param-value>604800</param-value><!-- 7 days -->
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter>
    <filter-name>javascriptCache</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.samaxes.filter.CacheFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>privacy</param-name>
        <param-value>private</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>expirationTime</param-name>
        <param-value>172801</param-value><!-- 48 hours + 1 second -->
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>imagesCache</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.png</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>imagesCache</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>imagesCache</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.gif</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>cssCache</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.css</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>javascriptCache</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.js</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Note: YSlow far future Expires header magical number is 172801 seconds (48 hours + 1 second).

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