Performance Optimization of the UI

Developers
#1

The UI runs slow at times and we started analyzing it with YSlow in FireFox. Has anyone looked into making some optimizations to improve the performance? I know all of these won’t improve performance and don’t make sense to implement but performance is one area that from our users perspective that can improve in the solution. Sharing what is reported by YSlow to start the conversation.

Make fewer HTTP Requests

Grade F on Make fewer HTTP requests

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Compress components with gzip

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Put CSS on top

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Put JavaScript at bottom

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Minify JavaScript and CSS

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#2

@jcornell All of the current UI performance testing I have completed has centered around the reported timings of ruby rendering the page in production.log in addition to the influence of queries to the DB or number of queries that are performed to render a page. I would be curious to see the improvements in end-to-end user experience by implementing some of the YSlow suggestions you listed above. I for-see isolating the environment to encourage repeatability and reduce variance a huge portion of this kind of testing. It would also be interesting to see if we run into any performance regressions by implementing the YSlow suggestions. If you know any other tools that can help demonstrate end-to-end latency measurements before I head off to search, that would be appreciated. I could combine end-to-end latency results with my current testing efforts to provide a more holistic view into UI performance.

#3

Some of these we may get automatically in the transition to Rails 4 and using the asset pipeline.