You have done all the caching tricks in the book on the server side: memcache, apc, database cache and so on and squeezed every millisecond out of it, now your site is as fast as it will ever get. Well guess again ! Too often people forget that what you are effectively caching and creating with those technologies is the HTML part of the user response time, now if they are done correctly then HTML is 10 - 20% of your users response time, so there is room for a whole lot of improvements on those other 80 - 90%. You will be taken through a couple of important steps to achieve this, such as how to optimize your JavaScript, CSS, Images, Cookies and a whole sleeve of other things that make frontend caching the magical place that it is. After having attended this talk you will not only have learned to make your sites faster for your long term users but also people coming for the first time as well as people on slower connections.

1. Coping with the Cyber Monday php|tek – Chicago, May 2009

2. Head of R&D at echolibre , pear extraordinaire, published author, party person and an Icelande r

8. 80% of response time is spent downloading content

11. “ It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.” - Carl G. Jung

14. Key factor in performance Fewer HTTP Requests Easy to improve on

15. Sent with static content Slow upstream speed Big cookies

16. Cookie Size Response Time (Delta) 0 bytes 78 ms ( 0 ms ) 500 bytes 79 ms ( +1 ms ) 1000 bytes 94 ms ( +16 ms ) 1500 bytes 109 ms ( +31 ms ) 2000 bytes 125 ms ( +47 ms ) 2500 bytes 141 ms ( +63 ms ) 3000 bytes 156 ms ( +78 ms ) Times are for page loads on DSL (~800 kbps).

17. Eliminate unnecessary cookies Keep sizes low Appropriate domain levels Set Expires date appropriately

18. Be aware of max connection limits in browsers CNAME to point multiple sub domains to the same IP

19. One domain = 2 Parallel connections

20. Two domains = 4 Parallel connections

21. Too many hostnames can cause complications 2 – 4 sub domains is a good average

23. combinations vs. loading more than needed

24. JS does not comply with the parallel downloading rule

26. slight blocking in IE Solution: move them as low in the page as possible

27. Crushes the files Strips out all cruft Voodoo magic

28. JSMin Dojo Shrinksafe Packer YUI Compressor http://short.ie/compression-rates

29. You can affect users download times

31. CSS

32. XML

33. JSON

35. PDFs

36. Compressed data formats

37. robots.txt favicon

38. CSS Sprites favicon

39. Badly optimized Thumbnails PNG can be compacted 50%, no quality loss OptiPNG

40. Test on slow connections Slow proxies for developers

41. Data served through a single domain Smart routing software Data closer to the end user – Less latency

42. Amazon CloudFront

43. Appropriate dates Cache far in the future Change file names on releases

44. Hash tag to compare between browser and server Gives more flexibility than last-modified-date Great on a single server setup

45. Typically unique to a server Disable if not being used!

46. Use options that are not unique per server

47. Firebug Firecookie Yslow Hammerhead http://stevesouders.com/hammerhead/

48. “ Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.” - Carl G. Jung