Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Improving Site Performance

Performance is an important thing to pay attention to in order to be successful on Facebook Platform. Especially for Canvas applications, it's important that your server responds quickly to provide the most efficient user experience. If your server takes too long, users get impatient and leave your application. In addition, too many API calls can result in rate-limit errors from Facebook (errors saying you made too many API calls), and can cost you extra money in server bandwidth.

A simple Facebook.com iFrame application must take a lot of steps before returning data to the user. It has to request the data from your application. Your application has to return that data to the user. Your application also has to make API calls in the meantime to get information about the user. This can all increase the amount of time it takes to return something to the user.

You can do some basic things to prevent this from happening. Especially, you want to provide as smooth an experience as possible for your users so that they aren't kept waiting. The longer users wait, the less money and the less traffic you see. Here are my suggestions for optimizing your code to provide the most efficient experience for the user on Facebook, while saving you in server bandwidth costs:

• Combine API calls. This is one of the most effective things you can do to your application to improve performance. Facebook hasn't yet ported this capability to Graph API. However, you can currently ...