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.
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Last week I attended the 2-day Future of Web Apps conference at London’s ExCel. I really enjoyed this conference - there were some great speakers and I learned a lot. I hope to write a couple more posts this week covering the highlights.
One of the weirdest experiences was attending presentations by people that I’ve never met before but whose blogs I read/websites I use/podcasts I listen to or watch. It’s strange how I read BBCNews nearly every day, and on Sundays I often read The Times, but I’ve no idea who the people are that write the articles I read and yet in the tech world I know a surprising amount about the people behind sites such as GigaOM, ScriptingNews, Scobelizer (for example I know that Dave Winer has just got a Nokia N800 and the Robert and his wife Maryam have just had a new baby son, Milan). Continue Reading »