Title: Speed up your page, but how?
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: January 3, 2006

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# Speed up your page, but how?

January 3, 2006

Today I ran accross the blog entry by Marcelo Calbucci, called "[Web Developers: Speed up your pages!](http://bravenewword.typepad.com/brave_new_word/2005/11/web_developers_.html)".

It’s a typical example of good idea, bad execution. Most of the points he mentions
are really bad practice.

He suggests reducing traffic (and therefore loading time) by removing whitespace
from the source code, to write all code in lower case (for better compression?!?),
reduce code by writing invalid xhtml, and to keep javascript function names and 
variables short. This is nit-picking. And results in a maintenance nightmare.

For big sites, e.g. Google, the white space reduction tricks make sense. But they
have enourmous numbers of page impressions. Saving 200 bytes tops by stripping whitespace
is nearly worthless for smaller sites. And not worth the trouble. Additionally I
bet that Google does not maintain that page as such, but has created some kind of
conversion script.

Other thoughts are quite nice but commonplace. Most of the comments (e.g. by Sarah)
posted at that article reflect my opinion quite well and deal with each point in
more detail.

For most dynamic pages the bottleneck for responding to a client request is the 
script loading (or running) time. I suggest the writer to read some articles about
server caching ([my thesis](https://alex.kirk.at/papers/caching-strategies/diploma_thesis.html)
also deals with that topic) and optimization.

Often also the latency between client and server can be held responsible for considerable
delays. As the client has to parse the HTML file to decide what files to load next,
delays can sum up.

All in all, it’s a good idea to deal with the loading time of a page. But you have
to search at the right place.

web, speed, xhtml, script, caching

[Code](https://alex.kirk.at/category/code/)

Read this next

[Further Speed Improvements](https://alex.kirk.at/2005/12/29/further-speed-improvements/)

## 2 responses to “Speed up your page, but how?”

 1.  ![David McReynolds Avatar](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ad7acd70d4714e6c1a6705e1bb8cb4ddf8567cb72ff470ad00992ba445e87fc7?
     s=48&d=mm&r=g)
 2.  [David McReynolds](http://www.myjavaserver.com/~dlm8751)
 3.  [January 3, 2006](https://alex.kirk.at/2006/01/03/49/comment-page-1/#comment-95)
 4.  One of the things I kept looking for on the list was to move as much format to
     CSS as possible. The browser can cache the CSS and the page size is reduced. I
     just did a sample of [http://www.ustea.biz/intro.html](http://www.ustea.biz/intro.html)
     and reduced the home page from 20kb to 7kb [http://www.myjavaserver.com/dlm8751/ustea/intro.html](http://www.myjavaserver.com/dlm8751/ustea/intro.html).
     Aside from some small font differences it looks pretty close in IE. I’m still 
     trying to get mozilla to handle the three column layout but it still looks good.
 5.  [Log in to Reply](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-login.php?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Falex.kirk.at%2F2006%2F01%2F03%2F49%2F)
 6.  [alexander kirk » Blog Archive » 10 Steps to a Faster Web Site](http://alex.kirk.at/2006/02/02/10-steps-to-a-faster-web-site/)
 7.  [February 2, 2006](https://alex.kirk.at/2006/01/03/49/comment-page-1/#comment-133)
 8.  […] I complained before about bad guides to improve the performance of your website.[…]
 9.  [Log in to Reply](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-login.php?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Falex.kirk.at%2F2006%2F01%2F03%2F49%2F)

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