Drupal has a presence problem when it comes to front end performance. Drupal has for the most part ignored front end performance. According to a study by Strangeloop, 97% of the time it takes a mobile page to render is in the front end. For desktop browser the front end makes up 85% of the time. These numbers may feel high. But, when pages take 500ms to render in Drupal but 6 seconds to display in an end users browser you can see where this comes from. Read more »

Building high performing front ends to websites is often an after thought. This is especially true if you look at Drupal sites and even the high end of Drupal sites. I just finished reading Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, a book by Steve Souders the original author of YSlow, author of High Performance Websites, and a Google Engineer. This book directly deals with making sites fast.

Over the past few years I've read a lot about making websites fast. Most of what I've read and heard dealt with making the servers run fast by using reverse proxies, better server caching system, CDNs, and other server side elements. But, the performance websites users experience is based on a lot more than these. And, because most web developers build sites locally or sit on the highest speed of internet connections they don't experience what most of the world does with websites. This other side of performance that can have a large impact on end users is what Even Faster Web Sites addresses. Read more »

Are you writing and using environmentally friendly software? Have you ever thought of the impact on the environment for the software you've written? Working in front of a computer it can be easy to overlook the impact on the environment due to what were creating. It's not like drinking a beverage out of a styrofoam cup (they don't break down). But, there is an impact. As Internet usage grows in leaps and bounds we need to start taking a closer look at that impact and doing something about it.

Why Performance Is Green

Why did Facebook start using Hip-Hop? According to their blog,

With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead.

When we have less servers we use less power, we need less space in buildings, less servers need to be built for our tasks and our overall footprint is smaller.

Think about it like this. We buy energy efficient appliances, we talk about turning lights off when we aren't using them, we look at energy efficient cars, and we think about being environmentally conscious. So, why not extend this to what powers our websites. Read more »

When I was working on a script to preload images with JavaScript one of the decisions I had to make was whether to use document.createElement('img') or an image object to preload the image into. The recommended w3c method is to use document.createElement('img') as it is a consistent way to create elements. This is the method I used. But, I was wondering which performed better. So, I ran some tests and here is what I learned. Read more »