Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage
The new Yahoo! homepage, released in 2009, had a high bar to meet in terms of performance. The classic version of the page, a mostly static one, set lofty expectations for the newer version. Even though the new page has more options for customization and personalization, as well as being far more interactive, the performance goals remained the same. The team planned for performance from the beginning, laying groundwork that would allow us to avoid common performance pitfalls.
The team scoured Yahoo!’s Exception Performance guidelines and went beyond them, coming up with several twists that introduced incremental performance improvements. Every byte was counted, everything measured, to ensure we could meet the previous version’s metrics.
In this talk, I’ll go over the tactics that we took and the performance differences we made. Some of the topics include:
- How we decreased the average time to open up an application from 7 seconds to less than 2.
- How lazy loading of resources sped up the user experience.
- How we progressively trimmed kilobytes of data from the initial payload.
- How we changed our page flushing strategy to alter perceived performance.
People planning to attend this session also want to see:
Nicholas Zakas
NCZConsulting
Nicholas C. Zakas is a principal front end engineer at Yahoo!, where he works on the Yahoo! homepage, is a contributor to the YUI library, and teaches classes on JavaScript to employees and Yahoo! Juku participants. Nicholas also is the author of Professional JavaScript, co-author of High Performance JavaScript, co-author of Professional Ajax, and a contributor to the book Even Faster Web Sites in addition to over a dozen online articles. Prior to the homepage, Nicholas worked on My Yahoo!, helping to bring the world’s most popular personalized homepage into the Web 2.0 era.
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Comments
Amit, looks like the slides are up now!
Great session .. lot of information.. Thanks .. please upload the slides.
fantastic session thank you, thank you!
Nicholas and I have worked together on numerous occasions, including the chapter he contributed to Even Faster Web Sites. It’s rare to find someone who intersects guru, evangelist, and hands on developer. The insights from such people are valuable, and Nicholas will deliver on that promise. I’m a strong advocate of progressive enhancement. Folks interested in this talk might also want to attend Annie’s workshop Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques .