Aptimize Team Blog

How To Improve Your YSlow Score

YSlowAptimize WAX immediately improves your YSlow compliance by automatically optimizing pages with performance best practices.

Typically, WAX will increase the YSlow score by 20+ and at least two grades.

WAX helps compliance with the following YSlow guidelines:

Guideline

How WAX helps

Minimize HTTP Requests

Merges JS, CSS files into fewer files. Merges images into sprites

Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header

Automatically adds far-future-expires headers to resources and uses auto URL versioning to ensure cached resources are kept up-to-date

Gzip Components

Components are Gzipped  and cached on the server to reduce CPU load

Put Stylesheets at the Top

Stlyesheets are moved to the top of the page

Put Scripts at the Bottom

Scripts can be moved to the bottom (or anywhere) on the page

Reduce DNS Lookups

External resources can be cached and served from the local server

Minify JavaScript and CSS

JS and CSS are minified

Remove Duplicate Scripts

Duplicate JS files, stylesheets and images are removed

Configure ETags

ETags are stripped from the resources

Optimize Images

Images can be resampled, and GIFs converted to PNGs

Optimize CSS Sprites

CSS Sprites are created and organized horizontally

Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable

Favicon is configured for caching, and inserted if it is missing, removing a 404 condition.

 

The current YSlow guidelines can be found here:  http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

10 Steps to Optimizing SharePoint 2007/2010 Performance for IT Administrators

Default SharePoint configuration is not tuned for your deployment.  Did you know by simply planning for it you can easily double the performance of your deployment?   This webinar, hosted by Joel Oleson, will focus on tips and tricks as well as best practices around optimizing your SharePoint servers.

Joel will provide 10 easy steps and methods to optimize your storage, discuss compression options, and tune your worker processes. Don’t forget considering performance from client to server optimization. This presentation will include and address SharePoint 2010 Enhancements and techniques. Attendees will walk away with a step by step methodology and tools to get started today!

>> Register for webinar

In this session Joel will walk through:

  • Storage optimization
  • Page optimization
  • Webpart optimization
  • List optimization
  • End to end browser optimization
  • Performance Tools to make your job easier
  • Caching and more!

>> Register for webinar

Speaker Bio:

Joel Oleson is a senior product manager and SharePoint evangelist at Quest, where he is responsible for product direction and strategy. He is well known in the SharePoint community as an enthusiastic trainer, evangelist and architect, and he maintains a popular blog www.sharepointjoel.com - Joel is a frequent speaker at popular technical conferences, such as Microsoft TechEd, and often presents to local SharePoint user groups. Prior to Quest, Joel worked at Microsoft and was involved in the first Microsoft global deployment of SharePoint. During his Microsoft tenure, Joel helped various customers achieve the critical governance they needed to upgrade and achieve scale with SharePoint 2007. He later designed the extranet and hosted SharePoint deployments.

Before Joel joined Microsoft, he worked for a large telecom organization where he architected multi-tiered web applications and multi-staged extranet deployments.

>> Register for webinar

Google Experiments With Fast Web

In it's latest move to make the Internet experience faster Google have announced plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States.

The experiment 'Think Big With A Gig' aims to deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections; offering the service to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

The project also intends to provide a platform for outside developers to create and try out cutting-edge applications that will require far more bandwidth than today's networks offer.

Google has invited communities, cities, and individuals  interested in joining the experiment to apply by March 26 with a view to eventually building the network in a number of US locations.

Website Speed Key To Evolving Mobile Market

Interview with Michael Martin of ResourceNation - Android’s impact on the mobile market makes website speed even more important as the amount of people that will make purchasing decisions and do business using them is about to accelerate in 2010.

“… a micro millisecond difference, but that’s gonna be part of the factors of 2010.”


Faster Applications = Fast Web. Google Speed Tracer Released

In the past month Google has been preparing website owners and developers for its intent to encourage and reward fast websites.

Speed has become very important to Google - not only does it want its users to have a high quality user experience, it also wants to speed up your access to their services.

Recent announcements and releases include:

  1. Page Speed Firefox Addon. Helps diagnose website speed blocks.
  2. Ranking. Fast websites will be favored over slow websites in its search results.
  3. SPDY Protocol. HTTP alternative that reduces latency, increases website speed.
  4. Google Analytics. Faster tracking code load times for web pages.
  5. Site Performance: Google Webmaster Central tool. Presents information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.
  6. Google Public DNS. Promising faster browsing speeds.
  7. And, the latest Speed Tracer. Helps diagnose web application speed blocks.

At its latest Campfire event this week, Google introduced version 2.0 of the Google Web Toolkit; a set of programming tools designed to simplify the development of web applications and maximize your web performance.

One of the new tools introduced was Speed Tracer a Google Chrome extension that allows developers to profile web application performance and identify sources of slowness.

Speed Tracer charts the speed of your web application on a graph, where a score close to zero on the Y-axis means your application is fast, and a score near 100 means it's slow. You can use Speed Tracer to diagnose what's slowing your application down ,according to Google, it can analyze "JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more."

More about Speed Tracer