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!

The team from ActionThis have created a new product called Runtime Page Optimizer that will dynamically optimise your webpages at runtime. It looks like a fantastic product to solve a lot of the problems highlight by the NZ Homepage hall of shame.

Runtime Page Optimiser features:

• Combines all javascript and css on the fly
• Generates CSS sprites on the fly
• No code modifications required!
• Runs on ASP.net 2 and and IIS 6/7
• Compatible with IE6/7 , Firefox 2/3, Safari 3

The product is currently in Beta and from the demos it already looking really great.

Well done guys, I look forward to seeing this product hit 1.0!

In the latest in the speeding up NZ Internet series, I’ve just finished retesting the web performance of top 75 NZ homepages. I’m in the processing of processing all of the results and generating the tables.

I’ve capture more data to include DSL download time, caching stats of the pages and total number of HTTP requests.

One month on here are the key stats:

Averages:

• 305.1K for the Homepage size (Up from 304.9K)
• 50 secs for estimated download time for dialup.
• 6.81 secs for download time on DSL
• 56 HTTP requests / files per page
• 20% of the homepage in size is cached. (Indicating bad caching)
• 76% of HTTP request are rechecked against cache (Indicating bad caching)
• 53.8 Yslow score

Other stats:

• 49% of websites use no web compression
• Only two sites have homepages over 1000K
• Top YSlow site has rating of 85
• Worst YSlow has a rating of 29

I’ll post the complete findings shortly.

New iPhone 3G features

• 3g - Cool
• GPS - Awesome
• App store - Fantastic
• Price - Brilliant
• Available in NZ - Can’t wait

So what’s wrong with this picture ????

5 hours of talk time from 10 hours

A while back I created a picture of ZoomIn as a graph. I wondered if its changed . Here’s the ZoomIn graph now.