Life is grand

The screenshot shows a performance improvement. From an F initially to a D after half-an-hour of work. ySlow is a useful little enhancement to Firebug which scans your web-pages looking for common performance issues such as too many JS and CSS files (external requests) and non-compressed files.

My above score is done off of my development machine which doesn’t have gzip, expire headers, etags and, obviously, a CDN. All of those except the CDN would be on the live version of the code so I expect a significant rating improvement for the live site.

The main tool I used to improve the score was AssetPackager, a plug-in for Rails which every Rails site should try.

Obviously we all need to be careful not to end up obsessing over ySlow scores at the expense of our users. ySlow is based mainly on Yahoo! sites and you may be building a site that is so different the same performance rules don’t apply.

Thanks to Chris for putting me onto ySlow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.