I closed a networking section of Stoyan’s perfplanet calendar with an article about easy cache headers and pointless 304s. http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2010/easy-cache-headers/

On December 13th, Marcus Westin (@marcuswestin) from Meebo is going to talk about learnings from speeding up Meebo bar. RSVP http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-NY/calendar/14978519/ It’s a holiday session so come and win Amazon Kindle, courtesy of Catchpoint! Read more in ShowSlow blog

I was struggling with DBUpgrade in projects with multiple independent components. I had to maintain the schema in main project which was quite crazy considering that projects are independent and have different timelines that had to be in sync. So I changed DBUpgrade to OO model and added namespacing so you can have multiple schema-versioning…

I moved all my performance-related posts to ShowSlow blog. You can read them now at http://www.showslow.com/blog/ RSS feed is also available at http://feeds.showslow.com/ShowSlowBlog

ShowSlow 0.10 had some minor issues with install packages – fixed now in v0.10.2. If you had troubles installing 0.10, go ahead and download the latest package: showslow_0.10.2.zip (zip, 862K) showslow_0.10.2.tgz (tarball, 730K) Installation instructions can be found in the wiki: http://www.showslow.org/Installation_and_configuration Kudos go to Johan Bleuzen for filing a bug about the install problems.…

New ShowSlow version 0.10 – all measurements are now surfaced in the breakdown sections on details page. A few particularly interesting ones, like Page Speed’s Transfer Size and Page Size and dynaTrace’s Total time on network / JavaScript and rendering, for example. Also some visual prettying up is done with CSS3 gradients for bars (falling…

On October 13th, we have a special speaker: Joshua Bixby (@JoshuaBixby), President of Strangeloop Networks and author of Web Performance Today blog will talk about Web Performance Automation. Abstract: Depending on who you talk to, performance automation can range from the holy grail of performance tuning to a set of programming hacks that will bring…

Upcoming PageSpeed 1.9 has a few new rules implemented and ShowSlow needs to keep up. Welcome ShowSlow 0.9 with updated beacon. New rules displayed include: Avoid CSS @import Avoid document.write Combine images using CSS sprites Prefer asynchronous resources Just follow upgrade instructions if you already have an instance running. Or you can download code package…

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been using WebPageTest a lot lately – having a web-based app always available makes wonders! Testing one page over and over again is quite common when working on optimization for a particular site so I’ve added WebPageTest form to a details page on ShowSlow long time ago. This…

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify the benefits of performance improvements. Many tools try to show you data and many rule-based tests and best practices exist to describe the goals, but there is still no clear connection in business people’s heads between particular site’s performance and savings or profits that performance optimization projects will bring. As…