OmniTI and performance koolaid
In YSlow! to YFast! in 45 minutes, Theo Schlossnagle (CEO of OmniTI) delivers a play-by-play about how he made his corporate web site 35% faster. The amazing revelation in his commentary is that he was able to complete all of these improvements while sitting in my workshop at Velocity (ahem).
OmniTI is a full service web house, specializing in web performance and scalability. The irony of the fact that their corp web site received a YSlow “F” wasn’t wasted on Theo. The cobbler’s children syndrome. (Same is true on my web site – I’ve got to optimize WordPress!)
Theo walks through his changes one-by-one: adding a far future Expires header, removing ETags, compressing text responses especially scripts and stylesheets, and moving resources to a CDN without cookies. With less than 45 minutes work, his site went from a load time of 486 milliseconds down to 315 milliseconds.
There’s more low hanging fruit – consolidating scripts, consolidating stylesheets, and CSS sprites. But it’s great to get this early case study on specific improvements and their corresponding impact on performance. I hope he’ll share the results from the next wave of optimizations.