Speed Matters: Presentation and Resources

We had an exceptional audience tonight at DevGroup NW for my presentation on how to speed up web pages. There were a lot of good questions and an engaged audience. Thank you to everyone who showed up. Here is my presentation from tonight as well as some of the resources I mentioned.

• Speed Matters Presentation (pdf, 8.6MB)
• Speed Matter Presentation with My Slightly Incoherent Presenter Notes (pdf, 9.3MB)

The great irony is that I used so many images in my presentation that I can’t compress the pdf files to the degree that I would like. Sorry for the large file size. If it is any consolation, you’ll likely get to fully use your broadband connection unlike when you download web pages and are limited by current connections to a fraction of your connection speed. :-)

Books on Site Performance

• High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders, Yahoo (Not released yet)
• Speed Up Your Site by Alex King (Out of print, but available used)

Articles & Resources

• Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Site
• Yahoo Performance Team
• What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests
• Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane
• Yahoo Group for Performance
• Mod Expires
• Graphing Requests with Tamper Data
• Speed Up Your Javascript Load Time
  
• Optimizing Page Load Time

Measuring Site Speed

• Web Page Analyzer
• YSlow Firefox Plugin
• Live HTTP Headers Firefox Plugin

Minimizers and Compressors

• YUI Compressor
• JSMin
• Compress Web Output Using mod_gzip and Apache
• Using HTTP Compression for Faster Downloads (IIS 6.0)
• IIS 6.0, Content-Encoding: gzip

Statistics & Studies

• Akamai and JupiterResearch Identify ‘4 Seconds’ as the New Threshold of Acceptability for Retail Web Page Response Times
• The Bandwidth Report
• US Jumps to 24th in Worldwide Broadband Penetration
• Home Page Usability and Credibility Survey
• Replace GIF with PNG Images

Thanks to all of the Flickr users who posted their images with Creative Commons licenses. This presentation wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting without their photographs.