High Performance Web Sites

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.

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

Optimize the performance of your mobile websites and webapps to the extreme. With this hands-on book, veteran mobile and web developer Maximiliano Firtman demonstrates which aspects of your site or app slow down the user’s experience, and what you can do to achieve lightning-fast performance. There’s much at stake: if you want to boost your app’s conversion rate, then tackling performance issues is the best way to start. Learn tools and techniques for working with responsive web design, images, the network layer, and many other ingredients—plus the metrics to check your progress. Ideal for web developers and web designers with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and HTTP experience, this is your guide to superior mobile web performance. You’ll dive into: Emulators, simulators, and other tools for measuring performance Basic web performance concepts, including metrics, charts, and goals How to get real data from mobile browsers on your real networks APIs and specs for measuring, tracking and improving web performance Insights and tricks for optimizing the first view experience Ways to optimize post-loading experiences and future visits Responsive web design and its performance challenges Tips for extreme performance to achieve best conversion rates How to work with web views inside native apps

Annotation Responsive web design's dirty secret today is how bloated everyone's implementations are. Many developers are loading sites full of the styles, images, and JavaScript for all of their break points - and designers are starting to complain about responsive web design's performance implications. This book will help you build a site that reaches top performance on all platforms.

How can you help your Drupal website continue to perform at the highest level as it grows to meet demand? This comprehensive guide provides best practices, examples, and in-depth explanations for solving several performance and scalability issues. You’ll learn how to apply coding and infrastructure techniques to Drupal internals, application performance, databases, web servers, and performance analysis. Covering Drupal versions 7 and 8, this book is the ideal reference for everything from site deployment to implementing specific technologies such as Varnish, memcache, or Solr. If you have a basic understanding of Drupal and the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack, you’re ready to get started. Establish a performance baseline and define goals for improvement Optimize your website’s code and front-end performance Get best and worst practices for customizing Drupal core functionality Apply infrastructure design techniques to launch or expand a site Use tools to configure, monitor, and optimize MySQL performance Employ alternative storage and backend search options as your site grows Tune your web servers through httpd and PHP configuration Monitor services and perform load tests to catch problems before they become critical

If you're like most developers, you rely heavily on JavaScript to build interactive and quick-responding web applications. The problem is that all of those lines of JavaScript code can slow down your apps. This book reveals techniques and strategies to help you eliminate performance bottlenecks during development. You'll learn how to improve execution time, downloading, interaction with the DOM, page life cycle, and more. Yahoo! frontend engineer Nicholas C. Zakas and five other JavaScript experts—Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Steven Levithan, Stoyan Stefanov, and Matt Sweeney—demonstrate optimal ways to load code onto a page, and offer programming tips to help your JavaScript run as efficiently and quickly as possible. You'll learn the best practices to build and deploy your files to a production environment, and tools that can help you find problems once your site goes live. Identify problem code and use faster alternatives to accomplish the same task Improve scripts by learning how JavaScript stores and accesses data Implement JavaScript code so that it doesn't slow down interaction with the DOM Use optimization techniques to improve runtime performance Learn ways to ensure the UI is responsive at all times Achieve faster client-server communication Use a build system to minify files, and HTTP compression to deliver them to the browser

THESE HABITS WILL MAKE YOU EXTRAORDINARY. Twenty years ago, author Brendon Burchard became obsessed with answering three questions: 1. Why do some individuals and teams succeed more quickly than others and sustain that success over the long term? 2. Of those who pull it off, why are some miserable and others consistently happy on their journey? 3. What motivates people to reach for higher levels of success in the first place, and what practices help them improve the most After extensive original research and a decade as the world’s leading high performance coach, Burchard found the answers. It turns out that just six deliberate habits give you the edge. Anyone can practice these habits and, when they do, extraordinary things happen in their lives, relationships, and careers. Which habits can help you achieve long-term success and vibrant well-being no matter your age, career, strengths, or personality? To become a high performer, you must seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence, and demonstrate courage. The art and science of how to do all this is what this book is about. Whether you want to get more done, lead others better, develop skill faster, or dramatically increase your sense of joy and confidence, the habits in this book will help you achieve it faster. Each of the six habits is illustrated by powerful vignettes, cutting-edge science, thought-provoking exercises, and real-world daily practices you can implement right now. If you’ve ever wanted a science-backed, heart-centered plan to living a better quality of life, it’s in your hands. Best of all, you can measure your progress. A link to a free professional assessment is included in the book.