There is a video of his recent talk in a technology conference where he spoke about how web performance is important and also shared his experience on handling these issues, mainly about his experiences in WordPress and how the need for speed is really important.

Matt first talked about how WordPress handles the 404 – aka Not Found page – causes a lot of performance overhead due to the fact that the 404 page generated by WordPress is apparently database driven, unlike other static 404 pages. Matt also talked about how easy for developer to create a WordPress plug-in and how these millions of plug-ins can contribute to the performance issue by introducing redundancies: multiple and identical javascript file inclusions in the HTML header. Therefore WordPress created a new function for plug-in developers as a way to eliminate these redundancies.

He also spoke about how a millisecond can save time of people around the world collectively. He took a real example of his website WordPress.com where millions of bloggers have been using as their blog sites and explained how a small performance efficiency or improvement can indirectly promote a more eco-friendly environment: saving servers processing time thus less power consumption.

Interesting issue he raised is also on his experience when WordPress made a total revamp of its user interface and apparently they faced a lot of issues when viewed on Internet Explorer which I believe most web developers have been having as a painful and frustrating task which we are forced to conform .

He also highlighted a few times on his favourite quote by Joe Clark that reads “We’ve upped our standards, up yours” which was coined at the beginning of the adoption of web standards. Anyway, check the video below for a full coverage of his talk.

I’ve been working with Zend Framework quite sometime for web projects. I found it’s quite interesting to find that Zend Framework does not have any class to perform image manipulation even though a proposal for Zend_Image had been submitted to Zend community as a wrapper of existing PHP interfaces: GD and ImageMagick but unfortunately the proposal was not considered.

And for your information, GD which stands for ‘Gif Draw’ is a standard PHP installation, unlike ImageMagick. If you wish to utilize these libraries, you need to have php extensions called php_gd2 and php_imagick respectively installed and enabled on the web server.

The noticeable difference between GD and ImageMagick is that GD simply does not support image format like TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). If TIFF is not your issue then go for GD. And if you wish to make your development easier, you may be interested to use Thumbnail class by our fellow developer. But if you’re looking into ImageMagick I’m going to show you the steps (from another site) on how to install ImageMagick on your Windows web server as Windows installation is a bit tricky since “pecl install imagick” does NOT work properly.

1. Download and install ImageMagick software from http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows.
2. Download pecl-5.2-dev.zip (choose the version relevant to your PHP) from http://snaps.php.net/win32/
3. Copy php_imagick.dll from the archive you’ve downloaded to your PHP extension folder.
4. Add the following line to php.ini (in the extensions section):
   extension=php_imagick.dll

   or on WampServer click WampServer icon on taskbar, go to PHP > php.ini and add the above entry.

5. Restart your server.
6. Try this example script below to verify your installation.

   header('Content-type: image/tif');
   
   $image = new Imagick('example.tif');
   // Create thumbnail for the specified image file.
   $image->thumbnailImage(100, 0);
   
   echo $image;

   The script should display the image thumbnail with a maximum width of 100 pixels.

If you find the above steps are difficult to follow you may want to download php_imagick.dll here and start from step 3. And if you need help with these libraries, check the manual pages for GD and ImageMagick.

Lastly if you find this post helpful, kindly leave your rating below to indicate that this post is really useful and at the same time let others know about this post. And if your wish to let other communities know about this post kindly click the sociable icons below. Thanks!

In brief, Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed works by performing several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

But that’s not all, the good stuff is its article “Performance Best Practices” which explains in detail all aspects on what needs to be done to improve your site: from network (DNS, server settings) to browser layer (CSS, JavaScript, image, compression) which extends my previous post in greater detail.

However these best practices may not be the complete solutions, in my opinion. If your site deals with dynamic content, there should be programming logic behind the content. This means whoever creates the logic has to utilize the best logic for highest efficiency in terms of computation. And if your site deals with a database, optimizing the queries to the designated database is also required.

Ultimately basic rules for programming are to avoid redundancy and to distribute computation load whenever possible.

Foreword

Experience a spike in usage on your hosting server? Well, my old friend does as he highlighted in his recent post about his decision in switching his theme to a simple one: one that he presumed doesn’t chew up a lot of resources from his shared hosting server . So here’s just my little thought or sharing tips on how to increase your web site or blog site performance for better user experience.

My One Cent

There are few factors in order to achieve this, namely

Server Reliability

Personally I think your hosting server reliability is the foremost element to increase site performance, namely server up-time and connectivity. Essentially without a reliable hosting server, the tips below will not have much impact or in other words pretty useless. Well I highly welcome your input on list of reliable hosting servers to use.

Small File Size

Reduce as much as possible the size of the files used for your site: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and image files in order to save network bandwidth. As a result, your page loads faster.

For HTML and JavaScript

I guess the answer is simple: eliminate white characters (spaces and new line characters) present in the file. One drawback of course, it will be difficult to debug your HTML or JavaScript. Well you can easily solve this by maintaining your friendly JavaScript for your debug purpose and dedicate a “compressed” one for production.

For CSS

The similar approach as the former. However I found some CSS can be quite bloated or in other words huge in size for some reason. And it is more likely that there are a lot of redundancies. If the former case is true, try CSS Framework as your foundation/start in creating your style-sheet.

For Image file

Choose the best compression format (GIF, JPG, or PNG) that is suitable for your images and its purpose. Check this post to find out more about the advantage and disadvantage of the individual format.

If you use a WordPress blog, you may want to install a plug-in called WP Minify but be warned of its drawback which I’m going to explain to you later.

Reduce Round-trip

Wonder what round trip means? Sorry but I couldn’t find a best definition for the term from google, but I found a closest one from wiki and answer.com. answer.com cited that a round trip is

A trip from one place to another and back, usually over the same route.

In Web, number of round trips is calculated based on the number of requests made by a browser before it is complete: one primary request for HTML files and subsequent requests for your JavaScript, CSS, and image files if needed. The solution is easy: use just one file for respective file type. (How’s that possible?) Na… just kidding.

For JavaScript and CSS

If you have more than one files, merge them into just one file.

For Images

One way is to piece those images together and create one bigger image file and use Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to show the respective image to the respective space on your page. CSS background tells you how to achieve this.

Avoid Dynamic pages

Nowadays dynamic pages are inevitable as web audiences are looking for more interactive web sites which serve fresh sets of information each day or even every hour. I guess here I’m not asking you to edit your HTML files for each of your post (for your blog) and I think those were the old days where page scripting had not been invented yet.

Why do I say that? because dynamic pages may consume a lot of CPU power which may cause a hiccup on your hosting server. And worse if your site resides on a shared server, other sites may have to wait (or sacrifice) for your site to complete its computation.

Caching is a way to help reduce CPU consumption. Caching is a process of creating a duplication or copy of  your dynamic pages to be stored elsewhere, thus subsequent request of the same dynamic pages can be fetched from existing cache in order to prevent computation redundancy. For WordPress user, try WP Super Cache plug-in.

Just a note, avoid dynamic compression of your web files to save your network bandwidth as this has its drawback: yields a high CPU usage.

Lastword?

Well, that’s all for the tips. Mike, if you’re reading this, I hope this can be your humble guidance in finding the best theme and plug-ins for your blog.

Ciao!

BitLet.org

Good News! (or perhaps Old News) For torrent leechers this could be an alternative. But for those who do not like to have BitTorrent client fill up your hard disk space but still love to use torrent when needed, then BitLet is definitely the answer for you. BitLet is a cute web-based Java applet that allows you to download torrent files on a computer that doesn’t have a BitTorrent client installed.

Downloading a torrent from this applet is simple. All that is needed is to copy the torrent URL you wish to download and paste it into a box as shown below. Or select your local .torrent and then click download torrent.

BitLet - Type torrent url

Click the download button to start torrent-ing and you will be prompted to allow downloading the applet if this is your first time using this. Simply download this and unblock the installed applet if you have active Windows Firewall. And a small dialog will pop up showing the status of the torrent.

BitLet - Download Status

As depicted above, most of relevant information is shown on the box: transfer rate, downloaded size, file name (shh… censored ), number of current seeders, number of current leechers, and also edit your settings. But that’s not all, you can also upload your file to BitLet and share it to your friends to leech or even consume video streaming. Check out the blog here for development updates. Happy leeching!