Oct 8th, 2007
Improving website performance
One of the most interesting presentations that I attended at FoWA was by Steve Souders (High Performance Yahoo!). Steve described the work that his team have done at Yahoo! to increase page load performance which led to the (perhaps surprising) discovery that 80-90% of page load times is generally consumed by front-end activity rather than back-end business logic, database access etc. By “front-end activity” Steve is referring to activity that takes place after the initial html page is retrieved such as requesting static content, parsing css/js, and actually rendering the page. The obvious conclusion is that the biggest performance gains can be achieved not by tweaking sql queries or web server config, but by focussing on front-end performance.
