AJAX Magazine: Optimizing Page Load Time : Mobile Edition

Published on 2006-11-01 21:46:10

Aaron Hopkins, Google Software Engineer, have an interesting article on Optimizing Page Load Time. In the article Aaron shared his work on optimizing page load times for a high-profile AJAX application, and investigation on reducing latency due to external objects.

It is widely accepted that fast-loading pages improve the user experience. In recent years, many sites have started using AJAX techniques to reduce latency. Rather than round-trip through the server retrieving a completely new page with every click, often the browser can either alter the layout of the page instantly or fetch a small amount of HTML, XML, or javascript from the server and alter the existing page. In either case, this significantly decreases the amount of time between a user click and the browser finishing rendering the new content.

He found many interesting results :

Neither IE nor Firefox ship with HTTP pipelining enabled by default. This means each request has to be answered and its connection freed up before the next request can be sent.

By default, IE allows only two outstanding connections per hostname when talking to HTTP/1.1 servers or eight-ish outstanding connections total. Firefox has similar limits. Using up to four hostnames instead of one will give you more connections.

This means that serving small objects might mean the page load is bottlenecked on the users' upload bandwidth, as strange as that may sound.

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