This time around, I’ve added a couple new metrics, including website download time. I’ve used Webpagetest.org.nz to calculate download time. The webpagetest service is equivalent download speed to a fast office connection. (ie. they have 15Mb Down 1Mb Up connection !)
The bragging rights for NZ’s fastest webpage does not belong to Trade Me but to Land Transport at #1 and Canterbury University at #2. (Although Trade Me dominate the Top 10).
The key takeaway from this audit is the effect of too many page elements will kill download speed. Reducing the number of page elements will speed up the site!
Summary Findings
The average page size of homepages was 359.6K. ( Up from 305.1K)
Fastest sites load < 1 sec. Top site loads in 0.246 secs ! The average download time was 3.85 secs
33% of websites use NO WEB COMPRESSION (Down from 52% – Great improvement)
The largest pages were over 1000K
A lot Advertising javascript still is not being compressed
Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 35 javascript files
The fastest sites have less total requests. There seems to be a strong co-relation to lower total requests to speed.
Wow, looking at the blog, we haven’t made any posts in months.
Lots of changes happening, new staff, new office, lots of work! We’ve been busy on productionising some code, working with Gooddata and our new project with GWRC.
The recent news of the delay of Section 92A is good news. We have now removed our “dark maps” as the black out has ended. Thank you all for your comments as well as participation in the blackout.
We at ProjectX support the movement to blackout in protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law Section 92A. In solidarity to the blackout movement, we have “blacked” out our maps on http://www.zoomin.co.nz and http://www.projectx.co.nz.
This blackout will be in effect until February 23rd, 2009.
If you are interested in helping out and have Google maps, here’s the code we used to black out our maps:
//Assume you have a map object
//Create a BlackOutMessageControl
function BlackoutMessageControl() {}
BlackoutMessageControl.prototype = new GControl();
BlackoutMessageControl.prototype.initialize = function(map) {
var container = document.createElement("div");
var src = “http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html”
var link = document.createElement(“a”);
link.setAttribute(‘href’, src);
link.setAttribute(‘title’, “Internet Blackout NZ”);
link.appendChild(document.createTextNode(‘Why is the map “blacked” out?’));
link.style.color = “#ffffff”;
container.appendChild(link);
this.setButtonStyle_(container);
We’ve launched a new feature on ZoomIn today – Directions! Thanks to the awesome power of the Google API, you can now show you how to get from A to B on ZoomIn.
There are some really challenging questions in there.
Why were ETags introduced in HTTP/1.1?
What are four techniques for reducing cookie weight?
List five techniques for making selector matching faster.
Why do ETags (with the default Apache and IIS syntax) degrade performance with regard
to proxy caching?
Kudos to Steve for pushing the boundaries of our field. Its time that optimisation was baked in by default and every web developer knew the fundamentals! That starts by teaching the students of the future.
ProjectX is heavily involved with Summer of Code and we’ve just release a number of videos on blip tv
The videos are featuring:
John Clegg – Ready, Set Code
Peter Watling – Introduction to iPhone development
Douglas Talbot – Introduction to Agile Programming
Nat Torkington – Somthing I wish people had told me…
Here’s five reasons on why Smaps rocked our world –
Smaps was designed to be simple and intuitive.
Smaps is blazzingly fast. We worked really really hard at making the predictive search fast and it paid off.
Smaps was built to scale. The site has been running off only a few servers and managed to handle peak traffic of over 65K users in one day. (This happened on the day Smaps was mentioned in the Trade Me newsletter.)
Smaps was built on an open source stack – ruby on rails, postgres, apache / lighttpd running on windows and later ubuntu.
Trade Me backed a small team – ProjectX and we prove together could build world class technology from Wellington.
“When they first come to me I thought, that’s the most ridicolous thing I’ve heard in my life! But I’m in, and I’m with you”
— Temeura Morrison – Made from New Zealand
Added on 10/21/2008 at 05:31PM
Made from New Zealand – Awesome
Added on 10/21/2008 at 05:25PM
