Yahoo: 13 rules for making your web pages faster A few simple and not-so-simple methods for speeding up your sites. Jump to it Rich
I really dislike the the stuff about minimizing javascript. The savings you make are absolutely minimal in that area - as an example, i just "minimized" (no obfuscation) 889 lines worth and reduced the file size to 99.64% of the original size Gzip compression and DNS are about the only reasonable suggestions they offer.
Personally I don't think BiT's a slow site by any means. It could be faster, but most sites that actually do things aren't mega fast as-is. I often find that 'net connections limit page loading anyway, I remember how fast BiT was when I was on halls LAN, and it was frightening tbh.
I think the best way to make your site fast is to use as simple html as possible. Sites built with complex nested tables are going to be minutely slower than something built with the div positioning method. At the end of the day different browsers render at different speeds so that is the major bottleneck.
Yep. We get a frightening (as in, very bad) connection to bit-tech from our offices. By contrast, TrustedReviews is hosted in London and that feels like it's being served from a server about 2 feet away from me usually!
bit-tech is hosted in dallas, texas so the request latency is the crazy long from the UK (depending on your ISP). If you want to be nosy inspect the source on the site and you may find a timer telling you how fast the page loaded from the start of the php request until the end of all the data retrieval.
I'm not that fussed tbh Jamie - it's plenty fast enough for me, you crazy coder fools do a plenty decent enough job.
Bit's always one of the snappier sites I go on... probably the one thing left to like about living in the US. Though the link was still quite useful for my own intarweb doings.
I've never had any performance issues with BT (although things did feel slower immediately after the recent upgrade). I think the article does a good job of highlighting a number potential bottleneck areas which can be fixed/improved with varying degress of effort and cost. Internationl high traffic sites will benefit from a content delivery network and will have the extra money to spend on the additional datacenter space and maintanince costs. I'll start by turning on mod_compress (don't know why it wasn't already on) and have a look into mod_expire
