Great tips, thanks!

Re: inline images. Unfortunately they are not supported in IE6/7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data:_URI_scheme

First off-- GREAT book.

Second, yeah, I spent so much time trying to sort out inline images. Just no way to get it across all browsers. I did, however find a decent way, where Javascript converts a text-encoded image into a table with colored pixel-sized cells. It avoids the download of all the table info by rendering after loading. Now, of course, I can't find it, but I think it could be improved, it only uses run-length-encoding now.

Found it: http://www.bennherrera.com/EmbeddedImage/

It's interesting if nothing else.

Great tip, however as good as it is to make things faster for 'first-time' visitors, there is a compromise that needs to be made. While combining all scripts into one script and all CSS files into one CSS file reduces the number of HTTP requests, there is another problem in addition to the one mentioned about pages using different scripts and styles. Namely, maintenance.

I commonly use two scripts and two CSS files per page. One script file is for scripts that are common across all pages, while the CSS files are one for layout and one for presentation. I could easily combine the two CSS files, but in order to ease maintenance and changes they are divided up. So there is a compromise between speed and maintenance.

In addition to that there is the size of the combined files to consider, how much speed is gained by reducing the script requests to one and the css requests to one versus the time taken to download the larger files?

The question you need to ask yourself is, is the small amount of speed gained by combining all scripts into one file and all CSS into one file worth sacrificing maintainability, if not how can I compromise between the two? That's a question that should be asked with all of these tips, especially with the ever increasing usage of broadband connections.

You can and should get the best of both worlds, maintainability AND the fewer HTTP requests that result from combining the CSS files. How? Make the combining part of your site build process that you go through when releasing a new version of your site. Don't have a site build process? Then you have bigger problems, or, it could be said, smaller problems, since your current scale probably means you don't need to worry about boosting performance in this manner.

Michael - That's a very good assessment of the situation. And a great reply from PK.

If you have a variety of pages that use a different set of scripts and stylesheets, you should _not_ combine them all into a mega-file. That's inefficient because a single page is downloading more JS and CSS that it really needs. Try to find a compromise - maybe 3-5 combo scripts and stylesheets that will cover most of your pages with little or no unneeded JS and CSS being downloaded.

Combining the files as part of the build process is a good idea. I prefer combining them on-the-fly (with caching so the concatentation step is only performed once). This gives the frontend developers more flexibility.

Kind of ironic that this page only gets a 66 or "D" on YSlow. :)

A redesign of YDN that includes performance improvements is in the works! ;-)

What is your thoughts when it comes to using YUI? I've got a lot of pages that utilize six to eight of the YUI js files. Is it better from a performance viewpoint to utilize Yahoo's ability to host these files (not from my site, gzipped, expire headers, etc.) or would it be better to take these six to eight files and combine them into one file thus reducing http requests?

I bet that's a wash. I believe there's a "combined" version of the YUI libraries, but it might pull in more than you need.

How do you combine CSS files during the build process while able to work on separate CSS files during development? For example, during development, I use 5 separate CSS. So that means, in my HTML code, I have 5 tags inside my tag.

Now, when the 5 CSS files are combined via a build script, my 5 tags must be changed to a single one that refers to the combined CSS file. Where does this step fit into the build process and keep good maintainability?

James: In my book I have psuedo code for inserting scripts (or stylesheets). I recommend, if you're using some HTML templating system like PHP or even Perl, that you never have a SCRIPT SRC, LINK, or IMG tag in your templates. Instead, use a function in your templating language such as "insertScript('/js/header.js')". This function would output the appropriate SCRIPT (or LINK or IMG) HTML.

Doing this through a module that you control addresses several features: If your hostnames change, you can update all your URLs in one function (ok, maybe three functions). You can make sure you don't include the same .js or .css more than once. To your specific question, while in development mode you can include each .js or .css as separate files, but in production mode you can instead construct a URL that combines them all into one SCRIPT SRC or LINK request, and let the backend do the combining.

My friend Aaron wrote up a nice article that talks about this, including a trick for increasing the number of concurrent connections the user maintains. See: http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/

On my blog http://blog.aujava.com/?p=29 I have posted minimalistic JSP scriplet that allows you to combine and serve out as one chunk several JavaScript or CSS files with names passed as params. Gain extra 15 points with YSlow.

Regarding use of data: to embed images into html remember that IE does not support this which will render it useless for most users unfortunately.

Some more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data:_URI_scheme

I think what's important here is that developers know their users and develop for them. It's wrong thinking to believe that 'everyone' needs and will access the site. Know your users.

Shall i combine utilities.js + container_core-min.js + menu-min.js into yui-sulekha-common.js? I tried this; But, get js errors like, YAHOO.widget.Panel is not a constructor. Is there a way, i can combine the most used yui control's js into a single js, so that the number of http request is reduced?

How do i make a single call for all required yui control's js?

Thanks in advance for your kind suggestions.

Yes, combining the YUI files into a single file is a good idea. Double-check what you did - if the individual files can be loaded, then the combined version should work, too.

-Steve

Sprites are great, but if you have images turned off or are on a screen-reader then over use of this technique could cause problems. Prime candidates for sprites are images that are presentational (i.e. icons, gradients) as opposed to informative (a graph, or something that would require an alt/title tag). What are other people's thoughts on when/when not to use sprites?

What is better for a gradient background image? to use a 1 single image as a gradient coloured background, or to use a one light slim image for a line, and repeat it several times to get the whole picture of the background image? Does the second approach increase the number of HTTP requests???

Another critical point is to use URIs/URLs consistently as detailed in the Caching Tutorial by Mark Nottingham.

Basically to point to a certain location (eg root/home), always use the same resultant path — eg "/" for absolute path or "../" for relative path (to go up one directory) — don't use "/index.ext" (ext being the file extension, eg .html .php .xhtml .xml or whatever) on some pages as URLs are the primary way that user-agents/HTTP-clients distinguish resources.

In response to Rob (Oct 29th) it would be better to use the smallest image possible (preferably a 1x1), then "stretch" it with CSS. This allows the size of the rendered element to be flexible (imagine a user resizing their browser window, or you the author wanting to change the dimensions of the gradient-filled box), and greatly reduces the amount of image data needed (certainly the largest resource data-wise), the few dozen extra bytes in your CSS file will be negligible.

Seems the comments system stripped my link markup.
Mark's Caching Tutorial: http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/

This performance point is a little "hand-wavy" for me. Let me explain. All of the bandwidth savings from reducing the number of HTTP requests comes from reducing HTTP headers. Because browsers use persistent connections, that's virtually all the savings. Sure, you can eliminate stuff from external domains (where the persistent connection might not matter versus a non-persistent one because you're more often only transferring a file or two), but the main way to reduce connections is to combine files on your own servers, where the persistent connection will be fully active.

Typical HTTP request and response headers are about 400 bytes each, so you do save 800 bytes on each file. Depending on the size of the files you're using on your site, that may or may not be a lot. It's certainly a factor, but I wish the point would discuss it in that level of detail.

Hi, Adam. Just combining scripts has resulted in a 10% response time reduction in our tests, even though Keep-Alive was used.

Looking more at HTTP headers: I use yahoo.com a lot, so my HTTP headers would be big (because of cookies). So instead I looked at google.com. (I use it a little bit for the Firebug group, so have a few cookies.) My request headers are about 1450 bytes. The response headers ranged from 200-550 bytes. So real world web apps might have bigger headers than expected.

Keep-alive greatly improves performance, but having a single request is even faster.

Unfortunately our site is getting an F. Some time ago we went to iframes on one of our web part pages becuase the third party grid control we use does not play well with asp.net web parts and causes serious memory leaks. So now we have up to 8 web parts (each with one iframe) which holds this third party component and requires 6 js files for each frame! Obviously we have a problem with Http requests... any suggestions outside of scraping either web parts or the third party component?

Thanks.

Hello

thanks so much for the tip, I read them part very carefully , but till now I did not know if I have 4 images on my web site and I need to add future expire header in three of them and let the forth wi no expire header , how can I do that ? can It do that from the IIS layer or can I do that via the HTML code on each image?Please elaborate
Please advise.

Thx
Reham

Thanks for the response, Steve, and interesting point on the size of headers due to cookies. I had not thought of that -- cookies certainly could add a great deal to header sizes. This whole site has given me far greater respect for the intricacies of browsers' efforts at optimization.

I'm used to dealing with big files in p2p land where headers really make little difference. I can't count the number of times I've defended HTTP as a protocol on p2p lists largely on those grounds. With the small files browsers deal with, though, it certainly makes sense headers would make at least some difference, particularly with the larger header sizes due to cookies, as you mention.

That brings up another theoretical optimization -- reducing the size of cookies. It might make sense in certain cases to gzip data in a post request body rather than use a lot of cookies. As I understand it, browsers always include whatever cookie data there in a header, though, so it might not be practical when you need persistence.

Thanks Steve for sharing share a nice information.I am working in LAMP environment and just want to is there a way to add expired header to a script in html i mean while defining script tag?
one more question is there any way to avoid browser to check whether file got modified or not,i mean to avoid header to check the latest modified date for cached file?we can make file url dynamic so that browser fetched the file when it get modified rather than sending header every time to check modified date for a file.I think this way we can avoid unnecessary headers.

Hi,

Ok, you say combining css. But then you have the reset.css. Does it make sence to put the
code from reset.css on top of the whole stylesheet?

This is great information for someone that is getting ready to graduate with a degree in Web Technologies. I've designed a few sites for class projects but nothing major. You've done the testing and any information to help make sites faster is important. All the tips and suggestions are worth looking into.

Use vertical server scalability for best and low-cost performance using simple commodity hardware.

Remember to cache as much as possible.

http://www.thespeed.com/

There are 86 images on this page -- http://www.papergeni.co.za/index.htm -- yet it scores 100 on "Make Fewer HTTP Requests". How can this be?

What do you think about regular HTML table for layouts VS CSS-P. Do you think it will be worth to mention to the community since it will also increase performance. 1.- Because the HTML Code will be a lot less than regular HTML tables 2.- The CSS that will have the layout can also be on the cache especially if you keep the same layout on your site. Of course the CSS P code is a pain but it might be worth it.

If you don't have any other tool for doing CSS sprites, I recommend SmartSprites [http://smartsprites.osinski.name/]. It's a tool that will automatically create CSS sprite images and modify your CSS rules to use them - all you have to do is code your CSS background images like normal, and add a few very simple annotations. I've only used it on a POC so far, and I'm sure you could come up with situations that break it. But even if you just use the generated code as a starting point, I recommend it highly!

It is a pretty interesting issue. However, I am not yahoo - of course ;) The website with highest traffic is about 5.000 visitors a month. The others located at 100-300 visitors a month. Ok, I hope with experience bigger sites will come.
Anyway for better maintenance I have 5 stylesheets instead of 1 (my own css framework). What does this mean? Does it cost about 2 seconds, 5 seconds or 15 seconds?
And what's about requests to missing files (404)?

I have been writing about this on my blog at http://www.keralpatel.com and the useage of relative URLs instead of the absolute ones. The good thing is to check the total requests made per page load and trying to minimize it as much as possible.

One thing not mentioned is memory preasure on a webserver. Most servers host 100's of websites & if yours is not one of the most popular then your code will not be in memory.
A popular method to get around this is to ping your web site. This will keep the site in the servers memory and keep your site responsive. I use a free service called Site Stalker (http://sitestalker.prestigedevgroup.com). They also collect stats on how often your site has outages and average response times.

-Will

Latest version of SmartOptimizer can embed images in external stylesheets.
It handles browsers that doesn't support inline images and sends them original content.

Get it from here:
http://farhadi.ir/works/smartoptimizer

Andy, the point about reducing HTTP requests isn't about header size or bandwidth, it's mainly about round-trip time.
The time-consumer is not a bandwidth limit, but simply waiting for the packets to traverse the network and the response to be returned.

HTTP is largely latency-sensitive, rather than bandwidth-sensitive. HTTP would work well over a 56k line (ie; bandwidth of a dial-up modem) if the latency was more realistic than an actual modem (ie; a modem designed for low-latency, rather than performing compression). The main reason broadband makes web-browsing seem faster is not because of increased bandwidth (check peak bandwidth usage for plain-text using wireshark), it's because DSL equipment is designed for low-latency, rather than attempting compression.

We have a software component in Beta that implements a lot of these rules.
The RPO (runtime page optimizer):
-Combines JS, CSS
-Converts images to CSS sprites
Also - combining JS, CSS, Images means we can increase caching on client browsers, since server changes generate a new set of combined resources

This is done at runtime, so it means you don't have to make any development changes.
You can download the beta from www.getrpo.com (currently only for ASP.NET / SharePoint)

Ed Robinson
Chief Executive Officer
ActionThis
ed.robinson@actionthis.com

Please go to http://www.enginesdesktop.com/ed/compressHTML.aspx
it can compress whole site.

My host doesn't has mod_expires installed nor accept to do so. What can be the cause? And what other solution I have for expires?

Good article. This helps me and i’m interested to minimize HTTP requests in my website too. Keep on your great work and help others. Thanx.

It is beyond me why no resource bundling (by archiving them in files) has yet to be implemented in HTML.

See http://mindtrickle.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/packaging-resources-in-html-files/

Thoughts?

I am trying to reduce the number of http request on my works web site. As many people know there are always clashes between those that maintain things and those that want to make the site load faster.

When I use firebug it seems to take a long time to fetch outside js files. I was wondering what people thought if I used a server side scripting language to grab all the content from these sites then spit them out on the page. In between script tags.

I know this will add additional work on our server. This would decrease http request for the user and it would also reduce these ridiculous waiting times. Sometimes these outside script can take 1 to 2 seconds each (granted my work computer is pretty slow).

We are using a windows server 2008, Would the server "cache" these files much like a browser would then just check to see if the files changed? I am guess no, but maybe I am wrong.

I wish we didn't need these other outside scripts but I have put the ones I can onto the server. Some of the scripts need to stay on 3rd parties site. The marketing team wants needs theses scripts for tracking and other such things.