How we reduced page load time by 4 seconds on our startup

http://storecrowd.com/blog/pageload-time/

by thegyppo • 16 years ago

2 5 16 years ago

To summarize, they went from 7 seconds to 2.5 seconds (still way too long); mainly by putting the 40-ish images that they have on the page on a CDN.

patio11• 16 years ago

This was one of the first things to tackle, we’ve noticed that our Time to First Byte is the biggest crucial factor in your website “appearing” to be responsive.

This is contrary to received wisdom, and I love hearing contrary takes, but the graphs shown in this post do not suggest that it is true. The post then spends a whole lot of time explaining hard things to do which might theoretically improve this, and very little time explaining the easy things -- on-page factors like covered in the YSlow presentations -- which were apparently left uncompleted. That is a shame -- for the amount of work required to even start thinking about caching you can have spriting done, and that would have knocked off much, much more than the 25ms that was successfully knocked off the time to first byte.

You can test this pretty easily: add a 250 ms sleep to the page. I'm guessing that it does not add much to the user perceptible delay.

thegyppo2• 16 years ago

CSS Sprites technically shouldn't have anything to do with your TTFB since it's got nothing to do with the actual rendering of content.

TrevorBurnham• 16 years ago

This stuff is pretty basic. They mention using Percona MySQL on a cluster of dedicated servers... but they didn't even concatenate their CSS. Low-hanging fruit.

thegyppo2• 16 years ago

There's a mention of the Rails Asset packager for CSS/JS compression there - http://github.com/sbecker/asset_packager

How we reduced page load time by 4 seconds on our startup

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