High Performance Web Sites: The Importance of Front-End Per...

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Tue March 20, 2007 (Updated)

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High Performance Web Sites: The Importance of Front-End Performance

by Steve Souders (@stevesouders)
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In 2004, I started the Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo!. We're a small team chartered to measure and improve the performance of Yahoo!'s products. Having worked as a back-end engineer most of my career, I approached this as I would a code optimization project - I profiled web performance to identify where there was the greatest opportunity for improvement. Since our goal is to improve the end-user experience, I measured response times in a browser over various bandwidth speeds. What I saw is illustrated in the following chart showing HTTP traffic for http://www.yahoo.com.

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In the figure above, the first bar, labeled "html", is the initial request for the HTML document. In this case, only 5% of the end-user response time is spent fetching the HTML document. This result holds true for almost all web sites. In sampling the top ten U.S. websites, all but one spend less than 20% of the total response time getting the HTML document. The other 80+% of the time is spent dealing with what's in the HTML document, namely, the front-end. That's why the key to faster web sites is to focus on improving front-end performance. There are three main reasons why front-end performance is the place to start. 1. There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front-end. Cutting it in half reduces response times by 40% or more, whereas cutting back-end performance in half results in less than a 10% reduction. 2. Front-end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end projects (redesigning application architecture and code, finding and optimizing critical code paths, adding or modifying hardware, distributing databases, etc.). 3. Front-end performance tuning has been proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have

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High Performance Web Sites: The Importance of Front-End Per...

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/03/high_perf...

reduced their end-user response times by following our performance best practices, often by 25% or more. Our performance golden rule is: optimize front-end performance first, that's where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent. Steve Souders [Steve Souders is Yahoo!'s Chief Performance Yahoo!. This is one in a series of Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. This article is based on Steve's book High Performance Web Sites, published by O'Reilly.]
Steve Souders (@stevesouders)

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29 COMMENTS
Morgan 243 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Everything old is new again! Actually really interesting though I think its great to get back to the fundamentals, and even better to hear how much it can really help. The book looks great, reading it on Safari now.
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Fahed 243 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Are we gonna get the rest of the book for free over here, or is this a teaser?
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Morgan 243 weeks ago | Report Abuse

I doubt well get the whole thing but I read as much as I could on Safari, and hopefully he wont mind me sharing the companion website, it has all 14 rules but not all have examples yet. Still great. This is a must buy as soon as its ready. http://stevesouders.com/examples/rules.php
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C# 236 weeks ago | Report Abuse

The book looks great. I like it.

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Nick 235 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Is there a tool that analyses how the browser downloads the different elements on the page and gives something like the chart you posted?
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Steve Souders 234 weeks ago | Report Abuse

You can get charts like this from IBM Page Detailer: http://alphaworks.ibm.com /tech/pagedetailer
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felix 234 weeks ago | Report Abuse

I totally agree that reducing web page weight is a good idea. One thing to be aware of is

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High Performance Web Sites: The Importance of Front-End Per...

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/03/high_perf...

that the user doesnt have to wait for all the files to load before the page is rendered. AFAIK the files are loaded in the order they are specified in the HTML doc, so once the HTML and CSS has loaded, the user will see the page with empty spaces where the images and swfs will be. Thats why it seems odd on your graph that the stylesheet is loaded at the end.
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Steve Souders 234 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Not everyone puts their stylesheets in the head of the HTML document. They should, and thats the topic of Rule 5. In the example above, the stylesheet and script at the end are most likely downloaded via DHTML in the pages onload handler. Scripts also delay the rendering of pages, as shown in this example: http://stevesouders.com/examples/movescripts.php
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Chris 224 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Are you sure that the Use a CDN item in the performance tab is working? I am using a CDN, and its telling me that Im not.
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EricLaw 222 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Fiddler2s new Timeline extension (http://www.fiddler2.com/Fiddler2 /extensions.asp#Timeline) shows charts like this as well.
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Steve Souders 222 weeks ago | Report Abuse

You can add your CDN to the YSlow configuration settings (see http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/faq.html#faq_cdn). Yes, Fiddler 2 has great HTTP request timeline charts.
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Greg 216 weeks ago | Report Abuse

pingdom has a web-based tool to make these charts http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt

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Outtanames999 213 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Steve Souders has done a great job putting together these recommendations, and I applaud his book, but am I the only one that thinks Yahoo! happens to have one of the slowest and most bloated page loads around? Its kind of disappointing to realize that theyve already squeezed and optimized these pages and they are still slow loaders! The culprit is almost always fat flash files for ads and video. Nothing new here, but interestingly, I dont see flash files listed on the chart above. Perhap they are lumped in with images. While Yahoo! uses mostly open source (php, etc.) Flash is proprietary and Adobe has done next to nothing to open it up compared to other internet technologies even compared to other proprietary tech. That seems to me to be the biggest opportunity for page load improvement open up the flash tech so we can better manage it at the developer and user levels.
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Steve Souders 213 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Im all for making Yahoo!s pages faster, but I will point out that across the ten top sites in the U.S., Yahoo! is in the middle. Again, Id still like to see things faster and we continue to work (hard!) on making that happen. Your comment on ads is true. Third party ads have become the #1 slowdown on Yahoo! pages. Ive started discussions with the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) to setup a performance working group to get industry-wide support for improving the performance of ads. If you see bad ads, complain! Dont buy that brand. Complain to the publisher (like Yahoo!). This feedback will encourage advertisers to improve their performance practices so they dont drive away consumers. We are starting to dig into Flash performance. The Flash group at Yahoo! has built some cool tools to analyze Flash performance. But its going to take awhile to gather the best practices and make the tools public. Well share what we have when we have it.

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Jsn 212 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Steve, colleague saw your presentation at Future of Web Apps in London and suggested I take a look at what your group is doing. What are your feelings about hardware Application Front End appliances like F5s BIG-IP and Citrixs NetScaler? Think they are overkill if one could fix front end issues in software?
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Steve Souders 212 weeks ago | Report Abuse

These hardware appliances are generally focused on delivery of the HTML document. Since thats less than 10-20% of the overall user experience, the higher priority is focusing on the other 80-90% of the time. So these are not a first priority when it comes to optimizing the user response time. If your focus is to improve your back end performance (e.g., requests/second), these can play a role.
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Rob 212 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Steve, do you think there will eventually be a guideline involving cookies based off of the When the Cookie Crumbles article? Perhaps something YSlow could check? If images are on the same server as a cookie it gets returned in the HTTP request. If you have a site with a lot of new images, such as e-commerce, a lot of savings could be made. For example, on a search results page or a page that features new products with unique images. Since a cookie can be 4-5kb it seems that a large cookie could have a pretty sizable performance impact.
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Steve Souders 212 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Hi, Rob. Yes, Im baking 5-6 new rules now that address cookies and cookie-free domains. That definitely helps.
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Vladimir Krasilschik 211 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Hi! I look at the chart that illustrates HTTP traffic and I am wondering about how did you get it. Did you use any measuring tool that analizes and provides this information on the fly or add some smart javascript measuring code to the page? Thanks.
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Steve Souders 211 weeks ago | Report Abuse

See the comment from May 22.

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mp3 indir 204 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Thanks Dude
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e-okul 195 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Hi, Rob. Yes, Im baking 5-6 new rules now that address cookies and cookie-free domains. That definitely helps.
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kavin4u 180 weeks ago | Report Abuse

hey there, Are you guys looking for charting component if yes then chk this out visifire i really enjoyed drawing chart with various animations
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zuborg 180 weeks ago | Report Abuse

First, thanks for Your helpful work, Steve! Take a look at http://site-perf.com/, may be Youll find it useful. Its another online site download measurement tool, like pingdom.com, but looks more realistic.

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High Performance Web Sites: The Importance of Front-End Per...

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Outtanames999 175 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Steve, just wondering how the Flash performance work is coming along.
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sohbet 157 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Thank you very much for this useful article and the comments.
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telephone engineer london 134 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Hi,Its really nice post.I totally agree that reducing web page weight is a good idea. One thing to be aware of is that the user doesnt have to wait for all the files to load before the page is rendered.
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chat 24 weeks ago | Report Abuse

pingdom has a web-based tool to make these charts http://www.topluchat.com/chat.htm

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Havi Hoffman 22 weeks ago | Report Abuse

Folks, if youre interested in Web performance issues and topics, please join the conversation on the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/exceptional-performance/ Also, the best place to pose your questions and comments. Thanks!
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