Web Performance Tuning

Chapter 1. The Blunt Instruments

Let’s say you have a web performance problem and you hate it. You should probably take time to consider what you’re about to do, but you pick up the nearest blunt instrument, and . . . . What are those blunt instruments that kill performance problems, at least some of the time? Here are a few you can try right off without investing much brainpower or patience, though you may have to invest money. Some are not very elegant and might not help. But then again, they might.

Improving Performance from the Browser Side

Turn off automatic loading of images.

Turning off autoloading of images will help performance dramatically if the problem is simply that your bandwidth is limited to that of a modem on a regular dial-up telephone line (also known as a POTS line, for Plain Old Telephone Service). Of course, without graphics you won’t enjoy a lot of what the Web is about, which is, well, graphics. In Netscape 4.0, you turn off automatic loading by choosing Edit → Preferences... → Advanced and then unchecking the “Automatically Load Images...” box.

Even if you turn off automatic loading of images, you can load and view an interesting image by clicking on the associated image icon. Your next question should be how to tell whether an image looks interesting before you’ve seen it. This is exactly what the HTML <ALT> tag is for: the HTML author is supposed to add a text description of the associated image, which the browser will display if image loading is off. ...