High Performance Web Sites (Essay Sample)

High Performance Websites
Name
University
Introduction
Users do not care about the amount of data downloaded by the websites but rather how fast the website is. Web developers hence look for high Performance websites such as Facebook, and MySpace which access petabytes data and send terabits per second to million users making them the fast and awe-inspiring. In this case, most development teams in attempt to increased performance improvements focus on the back end. They replicate the architectures, tune databases and customize data caching in attempt to allow web server handle greater numbers of the requests but the websites still take longer to load and are a disappointment to the users. In simple terms, the back ends barely respond to the send users’ response time and hence, for pages to load faster, we must focus on the front end (Souders, 2008).
Front end background
As Souders puts it, when a person sends an empty cache to iGoogle, iGoogle takes only 9% of the overall page- load time to send the cache from browser to server, gather the information, stitch it and send it to the browser as HTML. This implies that 91% is load time spent at the front end. The front end includes everything that HTML document commands the browser to act upon including fetching resources. HTML document account for 17% of the page load time even in primed cache situations. Just like in iGoogle, most websites face similar situation whereby larger percentage of the page load time is usually spent on front end. Best practices involved in front end performances are therefore important to increase website performance (Souders, 2008).
Minifying JavaScript
Response time is affected by the data amount transferred across the network. Since compression is the best method used by developers to reduce text file sizes, JavaScript size can be immensely reduced through minifying of the code. Typically, the unneeded characters such as new lines, tabs, comments and extra white spaces are stripped of from the code hence reducing the JavaScript size by almost 20%. Even though most developers are likely to minify external scripts, inline scripts can also benefit immensely from size reduction (Souders, 2008).
Reduce DNS (Domain Name System) lookups
DNS just like a phonebook maps the hostname to IP address. Even though humans easily understand hostnames, Web servers only need IP addresses to establish connection. Each hostname used in a web page is resolved through DNS&...