In this webinar, you will learn how Amazon CloudFront can improve the performance of your website and cost you less than a traditional content delivery service (CDN). Amazon CloudFront is an easy to use, high performance content delivery service that lets you quickly and cost-effectively deliver website content to your users using a global network of edge locations in the United States, Europe and Asia.
You will learn how Amazon CloudFront is different from most traditional CDNs and how easy it is to get started.
I use CloudFront at both home and work and love it. It’s cheap and performs as advertised. Low-latency, high transfer speeds, rock solid uptime (pingdom has yet to report a problem in nine months) and utilizing edge locations is an obvious benefit (especially to the healthy percentage of visitors my personal site has in Europe.) So, if you’re at all interested maybe the above will be just the thing to get you started.
Why bothers? Well, for performance geeks it’s the easiest way to clear Yahoo’s performance rule #2. Don’t you want to be a cool performance geek?
Okay, okay… I’m guilty. The title is provocative and slightly misleading. I do care about developers. Developers are my people and I want nothing but the best for them.
That said, when I’m sitting down planning a site, application or component, my first thought isn’t about making things easier for developers. It’s about making things easier for users. If I can do both, great. The world is just that much nearer to perfection. If not, whenever possible I’m going to err on the side the user by trying to make the site they see better/stronger/faster.
(well, maybe not stronger…)
That’s why I cringe when people enthuse about how easy something was to implement.
“That was great. I just had to write two lines of JavaScript and I’ve this cool Ajax component.”
In a post entitled, “Let’s Make the Web Faster,” Google launches wholeheartedly into the dialog about web performance. They’ve already offered up Page Speed, which is a welome addition to the page performane toolbox, but starting a high profile dialog helps people like me in a big way. Personally, I would love to find a demand for page performance consulting, as I’d be just the guy to fill such a demand and it would be very rewarding work. Making sites faster means users are happier. I like happy users. Read the rest of this entry »
I suspect it’s because the people that are most vocal about the subject are from places like Google and Yahoo!, but it seems to me that a lot of people think that front end performance really only matters for extremely high traffic sites. When talking about these kind of things with other engineers at conferences and the like I’ve heard something similar to the following a few times and it left me scratching my head:
“That stuff is for the Googles of the world. We don’t really need to focus on that with what we do.”
It made quite a splash recently so I’m sure some of you are curious about Amazon’s new Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, CloudFront. I know the Amazon Web Services suite of tools can be a little intimidating for non-developers, so this article outline how pretty much any reasonably technical person can get themselves up and running on CloudFront and can start reaping the benefits of geographical optimized content delivery. Read the rest of this entry »
I was reading John Resig’s Browser Page Load Performance post earlier today and followed up from there on the concept of Link prefetching. Currently supported by Firefox 2+, Link prefetching is a browser based mechanism for fetching “future” content. Considering I wrote (and ultimately scrapped*) similar functionality for my gallery pages, I was obviously intrigued. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Internet, anyone out there have any experience with lightweight web servers that they’d like to share?
We’re (meaning Cramah!) looking to set up an asset server to serve static assets like css, javascript, images, flash (destined for progressive downloads) and mp3s. We want to offload that kind of stuff from app servers as a general architecture approach going forward (my obsession with performance is spreading ) Since it’s (at some level) my baby and is something I’m generally interested in, I’ve taken a little time and starting looking into what the set-up should entail. I’ve done a little bit of research and it looks like the names I already know are the names that people are using:
Based on what I knew when I started, what I’ve read since, and a recommendation from a co-worker, lighttpd seems to be the way to go. Thing is, I don’t want to jump into anything before asking you, the Internet, if there’s anything I should know about it (or the other two) before heading down that path.
So… anyone out there using this stuff and feel like sharing an anecdote or two? Is there some other candidate I’m missing?
What follows is a YSlow based performance survey of 200 top web sites. The list was seeded seeded by the the Compete Attention 200, a list based on the amount of time people spend at certain sites- as opposed to page views, etc. It’s a little out of date, but it’s as good a list as any to choose from, so I went with it (especially since sites like many of these where people spend a lot of time and that serve a lot of big media would benefit from far futures expires headers, CDNs, etc.)
For the most part I just dropped the URL in and went to the home page once, recording the YSlow score I saw there. With sites that had country specific home pages and "choose your country" gatekeeper screens, I clicked through to the US home page.
Sites marked with an asterisk were bought/merged, etc. and no longer pointed to the original Compete Attention 200 URL. Blank YSlow grades mean I couldn’t get the report to actually run. All three sites simply hung up when the performance button was pressed.
Amazon S3 is a great option for (among other things) image hosting, YSlow is a great little tool for uncovering performance related issues with a site and using Bucket Explorer allows a person to easily upload files to the S3 service while setting custom headers. Using the tool to set far future expires headers facilitates caching which improves site performance. Read the rest of this entry »
