Yahoo! Performance Engineers discuss what the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests
Written by on December 3rd, 2006 in Ajax News.
Tenni Theurer, a performance engineer at Yahoo!, has written a post on What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests.
It focuses on looking at the entirety of a page load, using the example of yahoo.com:
ASIDE: I have been using the beta of Firebug to see exactly this kind of data when I go to my own pages. It is invaluable, and I couldn’t live without the current Firebug beta.
Our experience shows that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time and is often the easiest performance improvement to make.
There is a lot more to this of course. Setting up the correct cache-control settings for items that do not change often is important. The backend is also important. A few architecture changes and you can spend magnitudes more time in the backend processing. We obviously want to start shoving HTML back down the pipe as quickly as possible.
It also shows how much of a difference parallel downloads can make. If you can tweak your browser to do more at once, it can make a big difference (as chances are your bandwidth isn’t the bottleneck).
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/yahoo-performance-engineers-discuss-what-the-8020-rule-tells-us-about-reducing-http-requests