Nextpoint Lab

As a user, one of the best ways to improve your online experience is to avoid downloading repetitive files. It’s a two way street though: If the site you’re visiting doesn’t put any effort into it – you’re (often) not going to be able to do much from the user perspective.

A great place to start is with the YSlow extension for Firefox.  I wouldn’t necessarily be concerned with the score that it churns out, but it will give you useful (and some not so useful) tuning pointers.

Gzip

Pretty simple concept that we’re all probably familiar with: Compact a file down to a smaller version – transmit – restore to it’s usable form.  We’ve got Apache serving up most of our content so we let mod_deflate do most of the work here.  Pretty simple, just make sure not to waste your time trying to compress things that are binary or already compressed.

ETags

These aren’t really for us.  Balancing requests over a set of multiple servers doesn’t necessarily mean ETags can’t work… but it does make it trickier to really get a benefit.  In the end, we just left them out.

Add an Expires Header

This is a little trickier than it may seem.  You never want people to download “the same file” if they can help it, but when you’ve changed that file — you need them to get the changed version immediately.

After playing with a wide variety of approaches, we settled on conditionally adding an expires header.  That’s been in our app for more than a year now and we’ve been pretty pleased with it.  The initial catch was symlinks being overwritten when we re-deployed.  It was a pretty simple addition to have our Capistrano scripts recreate it and we were quickly on track.

Here’s a sample YSlow shot of our savings.  It’s “pretty nice” to reduce what our users need to download on each request from their desk at work, but the savings for those using the site via a handheld device (or other slow connection) is pretty incredible.

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