Advanced Performance Techniques

Introduction

It’s not often that a developer proudly pounds away for weeks on his input device, only to end up with a small compressed tool.

This may resemble Barbara Windsor’s opening line from ‘Carry On Coding’, but it is important to remember that the speed of your website plays an integral role in its usability, availability and appeal.  Companies such as Google and Yahoo! have unquestionably verified this theory, gaining and retaining a large percentage of the web audience.

The advent of broadband, inexpensive technology, and the current buzz surrounding XML may have shifted the IT community’s focus away from online efficiency, but performance issues are as relevant today, if not more so, than they were a year ago.  Broadband still hasn’t arrived for the majority.  Cheaper technology is allowing more people to connect, hence more Internet traffic.  And our saviour XML – owing to its extensible plain-text format – is actually quite a bit bulkier than most of what it replaces.

Having praised the need for speed, it seems a little ironic that the sites gaining the press’s attention - and usually those winning the awards - are those that appear to have made little attempt to employ efficiency measures.  In fact, they are usually heavy with Flash imagery and content.  This article, therefore, concentrates on areas that can increase performance (or appear to increase performance) without changing the look and feel of the site.  Widely covered topics, such as image compression, will not be included – instead, some lesser-known techniques are exposed.