Optimize This

An article on Optimizing Web Page Load Times popped onto my radar the other day, and it's really quite excellent. It's written by Google engineer Aaron Hopkins, and contains experimental data, links and a whole busload of optimization recommendations. Modern browsers with their default network settings are remarkably limited, and the article details several ways to greatly improve performance, such turning on keepalive connections on your web server, and serving files from four hostnames to beat browser connection constraints. Caching, compression and benchmarking are also mentioned, as well as reducing the number of external objects on a page, since browsers grab one large chunk of data a lot faster than when it's chopped up into many smaller files. There's even a nifty little Javascript code snippet that does quick and dirty page load time logging. There's probably no need to use this stuff on Hamfisted unless I suddenly become a worldwide media sensation, but academically is rather delicious, and practically its impact on medium to high volume sites can be enormous.