Lately I've been diving into the world of website performance optimization. This article is the first entry in a series about website optimization.

A lot has been written on this subject already but I figured it would be great anyway to share my experiences with you all in order to consolidate what I've learned and because I may even come up with something new. You never know!

The site I'm using as a 'showcase example' for my optimization odyssey is Eurobands. I could have used my own blog but it's currently not in a very easy to maintain state and it's running a less widely known publishing system compared to the one Eurobands is using: Pivot. Eurobands is running WordPress which is used by a much larger audience which is why I figured this site would be a better candidate to dedicate my article to. My own site will get the royal treatment as soon as Pivot 2.0 comes out.

Two types of performance

There's two different ways to look at a website's performance. First of all there's raw server performance. How many page request can a server handle before it collapses under load and more important: how fast can it process them. On a high volume website this aspect of performance is very important because it determines how many users a machine can serve before additional server capacity is needed. This article is not about this kind of performance tuning. WordPress comes with a pretty robust caching engine built in which makes it perform as fast as it possibly can.

The second way to look at performance is what we could call 'perceived performance'. It's the speed at which your site appears to perform to the user. Even if your server is capable of serving all files required to render your website's pages in a visitor's browser as fast as it gets, your site may still appear slow to the user. A fast pipe doesn't necessarily result in a fast website. Slow client-side performance can have a plethora of causes. There's an awful lot to gain on the front end side of the game which is what this article is about.

My friend Simon told me about a gem of a Mac OS X application tonight that I just had to tell you all about on this site. As most of you know, most Mac OS X binaries come in universal binary format to make sure they run on both Intel and PowerPC architectures. While this mechanism is absolutely great, it does lead to unnecessary large executables. This is where Xslimmer comes into play.

Xslimmer dramatically reduces the size of your Mac OS X binaries by stripping out everything you don't need on the CPU architecture you're using. Especially on the Intel platform this leads to dramatic gains in disk space. I gained a whopping 2.5GB of disk space by 'slimming' all my installed applications. Absolutely amazing!

If this page looks broken to you, read below why that is.

I'm getting more and more annoyed with Dreamhost lately. It seems this hosting provider just can't get their shit together. A list of annoyances from the past week:

• Random 503 error pages on this website
• Mint hardly tracking stats anymore for over 24h now
• Random components of the site not loading and therefore breaking it
• Email outages
• Eurobands going completely down every once in a while
• Random malfunction of account features (SSH, ftp, etc.)
• the list goes on...

Given the fact that I haven't earned any referral bonuses for months while I used to get at least one or 2 a month for a long time I figured I'm probably not the only one being seriously dissatisfied with Dreamhost's performance. So here's to all other DH users: Am I just having a serious case of bad luck or is everyone having these highly annoying problems?

This post serves as a prelude to a longer article I plan to write in the near future. I figured it would be nice to go ahead and ask for some opinions / reactions first. Who knows something interesting may come up that can be used in the article.

Last week my collegue Christian Heilmann gave an interesting presentation called Casting Online Shadows. His talk was about the person you are online compared to the person you are in real life and much more important: about the impression other people have of you when all they've got is what they see from you on the internet. The entire presentation can be downloaded here in PDF format in case you're interested.

It's official: our next open Hack Day will take place June 16th and 17th, Saturday and Sunday, at the Alexandra Palace in London. More information is available now at hackday.org.

So there it is! My new employer, a young and promising internet startup and the BBC are organising the first open hack day in Europe. This brilliant event which will be held at the Alexandra Palace in London will allow 400+ talented people to attend hack-related presentations from some of the web's most respected developers. After that, a 24-hours hacking extravaganza will start with the support of pizza, beer, wi-fi and lots of help on the various Yahoo! API's from the experts. Make your idea a reality in 24 hours and who knows you'll end up being the best of show! You can win awards from sponsors and of course you'll have amazing bragging rights. The good news is, there's still some spots left for you all! So if you have an awesome idea with which you think you could become the star of the weekend then why not check it out and sign up?

Of course I'll be around so if you end up attending the event and you'd like to meet for a beer or some random geekery just drop me a line!

Tags: hack day, Yahoo, geekery, programming, web development