Ian White from Neustar – Performance Optimization & Build Process

Ian White from Neustar – Performance Optimization & Build Process, a photo by tadnkat on Flickr.

Ian White from Neustar gave a talk on Dev, Prod & Developer environments & how to organize around the goal of making web performance better without making the development lifecycle suck.

Some notes:

• Web optimization
  • Organize CSS&JS
  • Multiple Domains
  • Gzip compression
  • Resource caching
  • Far-future expiry
  • Minification
  • Image optimization (not a lot of automated tools out there)
  • CSS spriting
• CI tools should take care of optimization, but if you put it on a different machine, they can’t test their optimizations
• Use mod_pagespeed
  • Really good for server-generated content
  • Take look at HTML being sent from the server and then does a whole ton of optimizations on that.  Handles multiple domains behind load balancers.
  • Works great on WordPress & other such stuff.  Not so good with Client-side stuff
• Making dev & ops work well together:
  • parameterize environments
  • Make it so when a dev changes something, it changes all environments or can affect all environments
• For static resources:
  • Try nginx or lighttpd
  • Simple / fast / low overhead / gzip & caching
  • Have it go in front of Apache & reverse-proxy back for some or go direct to files for others

Performance Benefits Implementing Nginx

• Far-future expires:
  • consider using MD5 as the version
  • Only issue is lack of human readability & tough to see if one is using the right version for that build.
• Image Opt
  • JPEG Mini or Smooshit from Yahoo
  • PNGcrush, others
  • Look for “7 image optimiation mistakes”
  • See http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/2DDrawing/Conceptual/DrawingPrintingiOS/SupportingHiResScreens/SupportingHiResScreens.html for Generating 2X res images for apple retina displays
  • Use Glue (github.com/jorgebastida/glue) for Sprite Manufacturing

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