ProjectX Technology

Runtime Page Optimiser (RPO) is now out of beta, the team from www.actionthis.com have release the automagic web optimisation tool for IIS based sites. RPO is certified for ASP.NET 2.0 and MOSS/SharePoint 2007 intranet and internet sites.

Here’s a list of benefits:





But wait there’s still more, the team are going to release shortly an online webpage optimisation report tool based on AOL Page test.

Congrats to the ActionThis team and I’m looking forward for future improvements.

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Here’s another awesome slide deck from the Velocity conference – Image Optimisation, 7 mistakes and how to correct them (PPT) by Stoyan Stefanov.

In his audit he has found 45.6% of the total page download size of the top 10 websites homepages are images. Here is the list of 7 tips for improving image optimisation from the slides.

1. Use PNG’s over GIF’s – The big sites (Yahoo / Google /Blogger / MySpace / Live.com etc) could save 20% image size by using PNG’s over GIF’s.
2. Not crushing PNG’s – Default PNG setting are not the most optimal. Using pngcrush can reduce the size of PNG’s even more.
3. Not stripping JPEG meta data – Jpeg contain lots of meta data including in some cases thumbnails of the image and audio inside the EXIF information. (Remember thumbnails should be 3-4K in size)  Strip out all non critcial exif information using tools like jpegtrans
4. Use Palette PNG’s instead of True colour PNGs.
5. Avoid AlphaImageLoader, try PNG8 or at least _filter
6. Crush generated images – GD and Imagemagick don’t always do the best job in optmising images.
7. Use CSS sprites!

Finally Stoyan says if you optimise your images you can save 10-30% of the download size.

The Velocity conference on web performance and operations is in full swing there are a wealth of information in the slides.

Here is a selection of the most interesting presentations:

• AOL PageTest – AOL have created an opensource tool call PageTest to test performance on IE 7/8 and they have created a online page test to show the performance of your website from East coast USA (Slides)
• High performance Ajax application – Yahoo. Another awesome slide deck from the Yahoo performance team. (Slides)
• Improving Netflix performance – Mesuring and testing performance at Netflix (Slides)
• Jiffy open source performance measuring tool - a new tools to measure the performance of your javascript. (Zip of Slides)
• Profiling Dynamic Web Applications in Firebug – (Slides)

Enjoy!

Its official, Google are now giving priority to faster sites. (As mentioned a month ago) Slow sites risk their “Quality” score being reduced.

So its important to Google….

Larry and Sergey, articulated this philosophy in Ten things Google has found to be true. One of these principles is “Fast is better than slow.” We’ve found this rule to be especially applicable to the landing pages of AdWords ads. When a user clicks an ad, a landing page that loads quickly provides a better user experience than a landing page that loads slowly.

So here’s the rub.

Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids).

Now that your Google ads monies at risk, there’s never better a time to speed up your pages.

Firefox 3 has been officially released and looking under the hood it has been tweaked for faster page loading.

Here are the key connection values in Firefox 2 and 3.

As we can see the maximum number of connections and number of connections per server has been increased. So that’s good news for more parallel downloading. And they’ve also increased the number of persistance connections so that future requests will be a bit faster. Another interesting thing is that http pipelining is turned off by default.

So far Firefox 3 has been snappier and more memory efficient! Download Firefox 3 today and squeeze a bit more performance from your bandwidth!