Workshop #1: High Performance Web Sites
Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster through a series of research studies on Yahoo!'s properties. These guidelines focus on the front end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. We focus on the front end because that's where 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent. This "80-90% front end" phenomenon is not isolated to just Yahoo!. It holds true for most web sites, including the ten most-visited U.S. web sites.
In any optimization effort it's critical to profile current performance to identify where the greatest improvement can be made. It's clear that the place to focus for fast web pages is the front end:
- There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front end. Making the back-end twice as fast reduces response times by 5-10%, whereas making the front end twice as fast saves 40-45%.
- Front end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end performance projects.
- Focusing on front end improvements has proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have reduced their end-user response times by following the best practices described here.
As web applications evolve to contain more functionality and content, these best practices are expected to have an even bigger impact. In this workshop we'll discuss the research projects that provided the basis for several rules, as well as the 14 rules themselves. We'll also use Yahoo!'s performance tool, YSlow, to do live performance analysis on popular web sites.
About Steve Souders
Steve works at Google on Web performance and open source initiatives. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug.
Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about Web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.
Prior to Yahoo!, Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. In the early 80's, Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning, including several publications and conference appearances. He received a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
About Tenni Theurer
Tenni Theurer manages the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team, making products faster, better, and more efficient. She speaks regularly at conferences and recently published a series of performance blogs on Yahoo's User Interface Blog. Prior to Yahoo!, Tenni worked in IBM?s Pervasive Computing group involved in developing high performance enterprise mobile solutions. She worked directly with customers on large-scale deployments and was involved in marketing and competitive research, as well as performance development. Tenni holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.
