| Blog | https://paulcalvano.com |
| Slides | https://www.slideshare.net/PaulCalvano/presentations |
Tonight at 6pm the NYC WebPerf Meetup is running another in person "Meet for Speed" session. We'll be taking requests from attendees for sites to do a web performance analysis on. Fastly will be hosting us at their NYC office.
This Friday afternoon I'll be at the Boston Web Performance meetup giving my talk on "Performance Mistakes". If you are in the Boston area and interested in web performance, join us!
https://www.meetup.com/boston-web-performance/events/304542099/
Last week I gave a talk at the #PerfNow conference titled “Performance Mistakes”. I started off explaining a bit about Etsy’s blameless culture, and how it’s ok to make mistakes. Then I shared 17 common #webperf mistakes using HTTP Archive data, with examples.
Slides are here - https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/performance-now-24-performance-mistakes-final-pdf/273431101
A few attendees told me they found some of these mistakes on their websites while we were still at the conference! So now they can be considered performance opportunities!
Performance Now '24- Performance Mistakes - Final.pdf - Download as a PDF or view online for free
Tomorrow at 6pm the NYC WebPerf Meetup is running another "Meet for Speed" session. We'll be taking requests from attendees for sites to do a web performance analysis on. Fastly will be hosting us at their NYC office.
RSVP here - https://www.meetup.com/web-performance-ny/events/300512872/
I wrote a new tool to help analyze potential third party performance risks on your site. It uses data from WebPageTest to group results in a sortable/filterable table with lots of metrics that might be helpful for estimating whether a third party is a performance/failure risk.
Give it a try and see if you learn anything new about your third party content! More details on how to use it here - https://paulcalvano.com/2024-09-03-discovering-third-party-performance-risks/
It likely comes as no surprise that third party content can be a significant contributor to slow loading websites and poor user experience. As performance engineers, we often need to find ways to balance requirements for their features with the strain that they can put on user experience. Unfortunately, for many sites this becomes a reaction to slowdowns and failures detected in production.
After last week's DigiCert certificate revocation incident, I thought it would be interesting to dig into some HTTP Archive data. I found that 1,241,943 websites would have been affected in some way (due to third parties). Imagine how disruptive that could have been!
I wrote a blog post about this here - https://paulcalvano.com/2024-08-04-third-parties-and-certificate-revocations/
On Monday July 29th, DigiCert announced the need to revoke a large number of certificates due to a bug in domain validation. The CA/B Forum’s strict requirements to revoke these certificates within 24 hours resulted in a pretty busy Monday and Tuesday for a lot of folks. For some others, the deadline was moved to August 3rd due to exceptional circumstances. What remained a mystery was how many sites and third parties would be affected, how many would be prepared in time and what the impact of a mass revocation might look like across the web. In this blog post we’ll use the HTTP Archive to explore the impact.
Yesterday I gave a talk about font performance at the NYC WebPerf Meetup. Using data from the HTTP Archive I was able to find and share examples of sites that could benefit from performance optimizations on their font files. The talk was recorded and will be shared soon, but for now here's the slides!
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/font-performance-nyc-webperf-meetup-april-24-1abf/267363735
Font Performance - NYC WebPerf Meetup April '24 - Download as a PDF or view online for free
After experiencing my first earthquake, I checked the
US Geological Survey's aftershock forecast page. The loading spinner causes layout shifts and is displayed for a long time because their text based assets are not compressed. Fortunately this #webperf issue is an easy fix.
Twitter thread here in case anyone is interested. https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1776302447108972663
After experiencing my first earthquake, I checked the @USGS aftershock forecast page. The loading spinner causes layout shifts and is displayed for a long time because their text based assets are not compressed. Fortunately this #webperf issue is an easy fix.🧵
Earlier this month Chrome shipped support for the zStandard compression. I wrote a blog post about determining which compression is best for your content, and what levels to use. https://paulcalvano.com/2024-03-19-choosing-between-gzip-brotli-and-zstandard-compression/
A few interesting findings:
- Brotli is now used more than gzip for some content types!
-There may be a TTFB benefit to using low level zStandard compression on dynamic payloads
- A surprising number ofsites are using gzip level 1!
I also updated my compression tool to support zStandard.
HTTP compression is a mechanism that allows a web server to deliver text based content using less bytes, and it’s been supported on the web for a very long time. In fact the first web browser to support gzip compression was NCSA Mosaic v2.1 way back in 1993! The web has obviously come a long way since then, but today pretty much every web server and browser still supports gzip compression.
NY UX Speed & Web Performance