Book Review: Even Faster Websites (Steve Souders)

Author Steve Souders (Head Performance Engineer at Google, previously Chief Performance at Yahoo) grew to fame with the YSlow Firefox plugin - a super little gizmo which gave web developers all sorts of ideas for how to speed up their web sites. The book 'High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers book' elaborated on everything the YSlow plugin was telling you. That book effectively serves a forerunner to 'Even Faster Web Sites'. In fact there is an assumption the reader has already read it, is already familiar with all the points it made and is now prepared to dig deeper.  Anyone with an interest in performance is in for a treat with this little gem.



I thought 'Even Faster Web Sites' detailed many clever techiques to boost performance. Amongst some of my favourites:

Steve Sounders

• Create a <script> element and set its src attribute to a JavaScript file you want to download asychronously.
• Use the script onload's event - which will only be called when the script has finished downloading - to avoid race conditions.
• Succint explainations on how deep scope chains in JavaScript can degrade performance
• Tips on when to use if statements, switch statements and arrays for flow control.
• A good overview of the Comet Architectural approach and how it can be achieved.
• Domain sharding tips: split based on resource type e.g put CSS and images on one domain, everything else on another domain.

There are also timely reminders, including:

• That IFrames make it easy for the UserAgent to print part of a page and are a mechanism to split part of your document giving it independent characteristics.
• IFrames are more expensive to download.
• That a browser's busy indicator stops once the Window.onLoad event is fired.
• Some browsers have limits on how long the JavaScript engine can run
• Web proxies and security software can mangle the Accept-Encoding header of request so that they speed up their screening of the response from the web server in a process Souders refers to as Turle Tapping.
• Browsers enforce their maximum connections per server rule based on the hostname in the URL not the IP address it resolves to.
• That CSS selectors work in a "rightmost first" fashion.

It is a super book. Not just to get ideas to boost web performance but because it helps deepen architectural understanding of the web. There are many important parts in the Web tier: all the different resource types, sychronous / asychronous processing, the various ways blocking can happen, a very sophisticated object model, a funny old language by the name of JavaScript and of course the endless list of quirks from different browsers. There was a time when everything revolved around the database but now a deep understanding web is probably more important. This book most definetly helps deepen understanding of the Web Tier.