Update: updated title and reference to mdot site below, following feedback

I like Responsive Design. Heck, I LOVE Responsive Design. I think it’s a brilliant methodology, which address true challenges in a very good way. But no matter how fond you are of RWD, I think you have to face the music – RWD makes it very hard to write a fast website.

I’m not saying you can’t write a high performance responsive website. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use RWD (Responsive Web Design) – I would actually recommend it to most organizations. However, RWD makes pages inherently more complicated, and all in all would make the mobile web slower.
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Last week I posted the first part of reviewing the architecture aspects of Front-End Optimization, and their impact. The purpose of that post (and this one) is to give you better insight into how FEO tools work, so you can make a more informed decision when considering using one.

If you haven’t done so already, check out last week’s post to learn about inline vs. offline analysis, central vs. local analysis, and optimizing close to the client vs close to the server. In this post, I’ll discuss the remaining 4 items in the table below.
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HTTP Pipelining is an old optimization technique that’s been getting some renewed interest recently. I’ve written in the past about how pipelining is broadly used in Mobile, and recently Chrome & Firefox have been considering enabling it by default.

I set out to try and assess the value of pipelining for page load times, and surprisingly found it have very little effect. This result surprised me, so I dug deeper and looked at this data from multiple angles – the rest of this blog summarizes my research and findings.
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Update: The follow-up post after reading this one (Part 2) is now posted here.

In the last Velocity, Pat Meenan gave a presentation reviewing Front-End Optimization (FEO). Pat did a great job discussing when you should use an automated solution, pointing out some of the strengths and weaknesses, and offering his thoughts about cloud-based vs on-premise solutions. One thing Pat didn’t cover is the core architecture of the FEO solution – namely where and how the analysis is performed. Since FEO has been at the center of my life for the past few years, I wanted to share my thoughts on the architecture aspects that matter. Read the rest of this entry »

Possibly the best part of working on Web performance is the community. It always amazes me how users, vendors, and even competitors work together to make the Web faster. Akamai does its best to support this community, through actions like sponsoring Web performance meetups and open-sourcing tools like Mobitest.

However, the most valuable resource Akamai has to offer this community arguably isn’t tools – it’s data. That’s the reason I’m really excited to share with you the launch of Akamai IO – The Akamai Internet Observatory.
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The SPDY benchmark I posted last week got some pretty heavy traffic, and I was happy to see it also sparked a lot of conversation and comments. Some of the comments were just trolls looking for attention (don’t feed them!). Others, however, held good ideas for follow up tests or suggestions for how to address the lack of acceleration.

Below is a collection of the top ideas that came up, and my thoughts on them.
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SPDY is awesome. It’s the first real upgrade to HTTP in 10+ years, it tackles high latency mobile networks performance issues and it makes the web more secure. SPDY is different than HTTP in many ways, but its primary value comes from being able to multiplex many requests/responses from client to server over a single (or few) TCP connections.

Previous benchmarks tout great benefits, ranging from making pages load 2x faster to making mobile sites 23% faster using SPDY and HTTPS than over clear HTTP. However, when testing real world sites I did not see any such gains. In fact, my tests showed SPDY is only marginally faster than HTTPS and is slower than HTTP.

Why? Simply put, SPDY makes HTTP better, but for most websites, HTTP is not the bottleneck.
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I’m excited to announce that today we’re open-sourcing Mobitest!

We always saw Mobitest as a community tool. Following the acquisition, we raised the idea of open-sourcing it to the relevant people in Akamai, and it was immediately accepted. And so, roughly a month after the acquisition, we’re ready to share the code with the world!

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The new iPad shipped today, and a lot of reviews and comments are popping up. In the performance and mobile design world, those conversations revolve primarily around images in this new Retina iPad era. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago Google released a beta version of Chrome for Android, which is substantially different than the built-in Android browser. It offers some cool new features, which are outlined quite well in the videos on the Chromium blog. Both Sencha and Firt reviewed and had high praise for it’s HTML5 support and more.

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