OK we’re wrapping up the programming on Day 1 of Velocity 2013 with a Hands-on Web Performance Optimization Workshop.
Velocity started as equal parts Web front end performance stuff and operations; I was into both but my path lead me more to the operations side, but now I’m trying to catch up a bit – the whole CSS/JS/etc world has grown so big it’s hard to sideline in it. But here I am! And naturally performance guru Steve Souders is here. He kindly asked about Peco, who isn’t here yet but will be tomorrow.
One of the speakers is wearing a Google Glass, how cute. It’s the only other one I’ve seen besides @victortrac’s. Oh, the guy’s from Google, that explains it.
@sergeyche (TruTV), @andydavies (Asteno), and @rick_viscomi (Google/YouTube) are our speakers.
We get to submit URLs in realtime for evaluation at man.gl/wpoworkshop!
Tool Roundup
Up comes webpagetest.org, the great Web site to test some URLs. They have a special test farm set up for us, but the abhorrent conference wireless largely prevents us from using it. “It vill disappear like pumpkin vunce it is over” – sounds great in a Russian accent.
YSlow the ever-popular browser extension is at yslow.org.
Google Pagespeed Insights is a newer option.
showslow.com trends those webpagetest metrics over time for your site.
Real Page Tests
Hmm, since at Bazaarvoice we don’t really have pages per se, we’re just embedded in our clients’ sites, not sure what to submit! Maybe I’ll put in ni.com for old times’ sake, or a BV client. Ah, Nordstrom’s already submitted, I’ll add Yankee Candle for devious reasons of my own.
redrobin.com – 3 A’s, 3 F’s. No excuse for not turning on gzip. Shows the performance golden rule – 10% of the time is back end and 90% is front end.
“Why is my time to first byte slow?” That’s back end, not front end, you need another tool for that.
nsa.gov – comes back all zeroes. General laughter.
Gus Mayer – image carousel, but the first image it displays is the very last it loads. See the filmstrip view to see how it looks over time. Takes like 6 seconds.
Always have a favicon – don’t have it 404. And especially don’t send them 40k custom 404 error pages. [Ed. I’ll be honest, we discovered we were doing that at NI many years ago.] It saves infrastructure cost to not have all those errors in there.
Use 85% lossy compression on images. You can’t tell even on this nice Mac and it saves so much bandwidth.
sitespeed.io will crawl your whole site
speedcurve is a paid service using webpagetest.
Remember webpagetest is open source, you can load it up yourself (“How can we trust your dirty public servers!?!” says a spectator).
Mobile
webpagetest has some mobile agents
httpwatch for iOS
the agile admin 
ni.com should already be in there! We use almost all of these tools on a very regular cadence these days.