Speeding up BlogSphere web performance02/24/2005 04:03 PM
To determine the speed of a site you
should NOT use a stop watch. Use a tool like IBM
Page Detailer to get exact
numbers.
I started by having a look at one
document in my Blog. After
deleting the browser cache I had a load time of 5,5 seconds for 53 items
with a total size of 155K. The 53 items are a CSS files, JavaScript files
and images.
A reload (click on the Permalink, not the reload button in IE) of the page
still took 4,35 seconds but the size was just 39K this time. So what happened?
The browser (Internet Explorer in this case) had the whole page in it's
cache but hat to contact the server for every item to ask the Domino server
if it has been modified. In this example, the Domino server replied to
the HTTP GET request by sending the HTTP Reply Header with status code
304, which means "not modified".
- So the cache saves bandwith but validating still takes some time.
Given the theory, that I do not update all design elements in this Domino
web application I started to look for cacheable content.
The images seems to be an easy start so I reconfigured Domino to add a
HTTP Reply header for all URLs with the following patterns:
*/images/*
*/icons/*
I configured the rule to add the reply header just in case the application
didn't and configured 30 days as expiration date.
After a tell http refresh config the server was ready for another
test.
On the next page reload the server added the following to his reply:
Expires: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 23:59:59 GMT
This tells the browser to display this icon (in this example) without validating
it with the server.
There are still other URLs in BlogSphere responsible for images so I added
*/2/* which will work for the emoticons in the comments area.
After these changes the loading time is 4,1 seconds for a size of 39K.
Still room for improvement.
What remains uncached are CSS files and the JS files. BlogSphere loads
them from a view names /0/ so I add another rule for pattern */0/* but
this time I configure it to expire after one day because I may want to
change the CSS file from day to day.
The result is great: 1,3 seconds for 32K of data and only 6 connections
to the server.
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Disclaimer
The weblog represent my personal views and comments and does not represent the views of my current or previous employers or customers.
Speeding up BlogSphere web performance02/24/2005 04:03 PM
