web-performance 9

Turns out that you can use data URIs in the <audio> tag. Just upload an MP3 file to http://dataurl.net/#dataurlmaker and you’ll get a long string starting with data:audio/mp3;base64... Insert this into your HTML: <audio controls src=”data:audio/mp3;base64...”> That’s it – the entire MP3 file is embedded into your HTML page without requiring additional downloads. This takes a bit more bandwidth than the MP3, and won’t work on Internet Explorer. But for modern browsers, and small audio files, it reduces the overall load time – sort of like CSS sprites. ...

That dip there in response time is thanks to WP-SuperCache. My average page load time has dropped from 1 second to 0.25 seconds.

One out of every 5 hits to my site is from a bot. I spent a fair bit of time this weekend analysing my log file for last month (which runs to gigabytes, and I ended up learning a few things about file system optimisation, but more on that later). 80% of the hits were from regular browsers. 20% were from robots. Here's a sample of the user-agents: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; <a href="http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)">http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<a href="http://www.google.com/bot.html)">http://www.google.com/bot.html)</a> Mediapartners-Google DotBot/1.0.1 (<a href="http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info">http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info</a>, [email protected]) Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 <a href="http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)">http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)</a> msnbot/1.1 (+<a href="http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)">http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</a> FeedBurner/1.0 (<a href="http://www.FeedBurner.com)">http://www.FeedBurner.com)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; attributor/1.13.2 +<a href="http://www.attributor.com)">http://www.attributor.com)</a> WebAlta Crawler/2.0 (<a href="http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)">http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)</a> (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU) Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I) ... You get the idea. The bulk of these are search engines. Over two-thirds of the bot requests were from Yahoo Slurp. Now, this struck me as weird. If I take the top 3 search engines that are sending traffic my way, ...

In some of the Web projects I’m working on, I have a choice of many small files vs few big files to download. There are conflicting arguments. I’ve read that many small files are better, because you can choose to use only the required files, and they’ll be cached across the site. (These are typically CSS or Javascript files.) On the other hand, a single large file takes less time to download than the sum on many small files, because there’s less latency. (Latency is more important than bandwidth these days.) ...

Speed up your pages.

Windows Live Local tries to match Google Maps. But Google Maps is just too fast. As I mentioned earlier (Why Google Reader): the reason I like Google is largely speed.>

I switched to Google Reader as my blog reader (I was using Mozilla so far). The reason was simple: speed. Thanks to the Google site’s speed and keyboard navigation, I can read blog entries 10 times faster. Now there’s a unique proposition for Google that a lot of people are missing: that their site loads a whole lot faster than others. It makes a huge difference to the whole browsing experience. ...

Firefox prefetches Google results.

Kevin Rose tests gmail performance at 1 GB.