Many “cool” web interfaces frustrate users with AJAX that doesn’t feel snappy. Other websites apparently load quickly but render slowly, leaving the user staring at a white screen until the last instant. Or perhaps they load and render quickly, but rely on unobtrusive Javascript to function, and it isn’t activated until all the images finish loading. You’ve probably noticed some of these problems yourself. Who hasn’t?
There are two things to know about this: 1) there is no direct correlation between advanced interfaces and slow performance; and 2) most such performance problems are relatively easy to solve, even for a layperson.
The key to solving performance problems is to master the lost-but-simple art of thinking about performance. This gives you the foundation you need to solve performance problems at the technical level. If you can reason about the causes, then the solutions will present themselves.
This session is about both the foundation and the specific techniques. You’ll leave with a new awareness and a set of practices you can put to use right away to make your own websites perform noticeably better. The session will include a live demo of some of the techniques.
We’ll begin at the user’s web browser and work towards the web server, covering caching, parallelization, and load reduction among other techniques. We’ll also look at the freely available and good-quality tools to help you analyze the performance, and how to understand and act on the information they give you.
