Professional PHP

Google engineer Aaron Hopkins wrote a good article on page loading times (via Harry). He talks about the impact of AJAX on page load times, focusing on connection limits, latency and the large number of external objects on your typical AJAX page. He offers a variety of tips on improving page load times, including doing more with the connections you have, busting the connection limit, caching, and sending less data.

I wrote about web page loading performance a while ago, when I linked to Dave Hyatt’s most excellent explanation of the issues involved with testing page load speed. In fact the Safari browser blog endorses Aaron Hopkins article and mentions how to measure page loading times in Safari using the debug menu.

On the Mozillia front, the Tamper Data extension generates some amazing graphs of when elements on a page load and how long it takes.

On the topic of sending less data, the Yahoo! User Interface Blog weighs in on page waits with a discussion of javascript minimization versus compression. They also briefly cover the YUI decision to serve components a la carte, rather than in an aggregated file.

Cal Henderson of Flickr also takes up this topic in serving JavaScript fast. He goes into more depth about the issue of a la carte external objects versus aggregated external objects as well as covering compression and caching issues with examples in PHP.

From the PHP perspective, Michael J. Radwin and Rasmus Lerdorf have covered web application performance issues in conference talks.

Are your web pages cacheable or not?

On the home front, this is my first post on this blog since I’ve installed wp-cache2 and upgraded to eAccelerator 0.9.5. And my first post since my fishing vacation, too