High Performance Browser Networking

Highlights innovations for building even more powerful browser apps including HTTP 2.0, XHR improvements, Server-Sent Events (SSEs), WebSocket, and WebRTC.

How prepared are you to build fast and efficient web applications? This eloquent book provides what every web developer should know about the network, from fundamental limitations that affect performance to major innovations for building even more powerful browser applications—including HTTP 2.0 and XHR improvements, Server-Sent Events (SSE), WebSocket, and WebRTC. Author Ilya Grigorik, a web performance engineer at Google, demonstrates performance optimization best practices for TCP, UDP, and TLS protocols, and explains unique wireless and mobile network optimization requirements. You’ll then dive into performance characteristics of technologies such as HTTP 2.0, client-side network scripting with XHR, real-time streaming with SSE and WebSocket, and P2P communication with WebRTC. Deliver superlative TCP, UDP, and TLS performance Speed up network performance over 3G/4G mobile networks Develop fast and energy-efficient mobile applications Address bottlenecks in HTTP 1.x and other browser protocols Plan for and deliver the best HTTP 2.0 performance Enable efficient real-time streaming in the browser Create efficient peer-to-peer videoconferencing and low-latency applications with real-time WebRTC transports

How prepared are you to build fast and efficient web applications? This eloquent book provides what every web developer should know about the network, from fundamental limitations that affect performance to major innovations for building even more powerful browser applications--including HTTP 2.0 and XHR improvements, Server-Sent Events (SSE), WebSocket, and WebRTC. Author Ilya Grigorik, a web performance engineer at Google, demonstrates performance optimization best practices for TCP, UDP, and TLS protocols, and explains unique wireless and mobile network optimization requirements. You'll then dive into performance characteristics of technologies such as HTTP 2.0, client-side network scripting with XHR, real-time streaming with SSE and WebSocket, and P2P communication with WebRTC. Deliver superlative TCP, UDP, and TLS performance Speed up network performance over 3G/4G mobile networks Develop fast and energy-efficient mobile applications Address bottlenecks in HTTP 1.x and other browser protocols Plan for and deliver the best HTTP 2.0 performance Enable efficient real-time streaming in the browser Create efficient peer-to-peer videoconferencing and low-latency applications with real-time WebRTC transports.

Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process. Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to: Make Fewer HTTP Requests Use a Content Delivery Network Add an Expires Header Gzip Components Put Stylesheets at the Top Put Scripts at the Bottom Avoid CSS Expressions Make JavaScript and CSS External Reduce DNS Lookups Minify JavaScript Avoid Redirects Remove Duplicates Scripts Configure ETags Make Ajax Cacheable If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable. "If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be adramatically better place. Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's reallyno excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore." -Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM Inspector "Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance." -Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In this book, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance. Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories: JavaScript—Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more. Network—Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster. Browser—Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques. Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster. This book contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas.

Covers topics including HTTP methods and status codes, optimizing proxies, designing web crawlers, content negotiation, and load-balancing strategies.

Retaining the first edition's technology-centred perspective, this book gives readers a sound understanding of packed-switched, circuit-switched and ATM networks, and techniques for controlling them.

Summary Web Performance in Action is your companion guide to making websites faster. You'll learn techniques that speed the delivery of your site's assets to the user, increase rendering speed, decrease the overall footprint of your site, as well as how to build a workflow that automates common optimization techniques. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Nifty features, hip design, and clever marketing are great, but your website will flop if visitors think it's slow. Network conditions can be unpredictable, and with today's sites being bigger than ever, you need to set yourself apart from the competition by focusing on speed. Achieving a high level of performance is a combination of front-end architecture choices, best practices, and some clever sleight-of-hand. This book will demystify all these topics for you. About the Book Web Performance in Action is your guide to making fast websites. Packed with "Aha!" moments and critical details, this book teaches you how to create performant websites the right way. You'll master optimal rendering techniques, tips for decreasing your site's footprint, and technologies like HTTP/2 that take your website's speed from merely adequate to seriously fast. Along the way, you'll learn how to create an automated workflow to accomplish common optimization tasks and speed up development in the process. What's Inside Foolproof performance-boosting techniques Optimizing images and fonts HTTP/2 and how it affects your optimization workflow About the Reader This book assumes that you're familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Many examples make use of Git and Node.js. About the Author Jeremy Wagner is a professional front-end web developer with over ten years of experience. Foreword by Ethan Marcotte. Table of Contents Understanding web performance Using assessment tools Optimizing CSS Understanding critical CSS Making images responsive Going further with images Faster fonts Keeping JavaScript lean and fast Boosting performance with service workers Fine-tuning asset delivery Looking to the future with HTTP/2 Automating optimization with gulp