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Everything you need to know about Web Performance (in 5 Minutes)

Filip Rakowski on June 23, 2022

I hear a lot of people saying that web performance is hard. Honestly, I don't think that's true. It could feel complex and intimidating at first gl...
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molotovbliss profile image
B00MER

The best way to sum performance up is:

Don't confuse performance optimization (ie, your code in regards to CPU cycles/memory) with caching at any level; one should always come before the other.

If your starting optimizations & are fullstack, Start at system OS calls levels in most cases on typical *nix OS: systrace + ps/htop/sysdig/newrelic/etc. Even before the days of "serverless" paying attention in particularly to any and all forms of I/O!

Disk/Network/System configs/etc. should always be a starting point if full stack. After then proceed to services like a web server, DB, etc. & Make frontend a half way point. Your
frontend code & clients will thank you. If not a full stack developer, kindly ask some metrics and questions to your DevOps team.

Just some notes from an old sr greybeard 🧙🏻‍♂️ optimizing performance on monolithic type open source code (Stares at Magento & PHP intensely.😵‍💫) Reference: an old stack answer of mine: magento.stackexchange.com/a/13992/69

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Filip Rakowski

I fully agree. It all starts with the infrastructure. This article is more targeted towards frontend developers, because this part is recently becoming main bottleneck of most applications, even tho it's not THAT hard to make it right :)

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Andrew Baisden

That was a great reading thanks for writing such a valuable article.

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SeongKuk Han • Edited

Great! Sometimes, it's easy to forget about performance while I'm working like in admin pages. I think it's good to being always aware of that.

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TK

Nice write up! Thanks for sharing.
By the way, if anyone is interested in going deep into web performance, I highly recommend the Web Performance Research repo.

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Filip Rakowski

Thanks! This repository is a true gem! Thanks for sharing it!

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Krzysztof Tys

Came here after dev.js summit presentation. Great work! Thank you for sharing!

In Optimizing Network section you wrote "Optimizing the networking part boils down to 4 main rules". I understand you deliberately left 4th rule to be forever a mystery ;)

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Max F. Findel

Great article and summary Filip, thank you. Just a small comment: you mention there's 4 points on Optimizing the Network but you only mention 3 😬

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Fyodor

Very cool summary of the most important information on performance optimization 👍💪

Ordered list in part 2 is a bit broken 🤫

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Filip Rakowski

Thank you, fixed!

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Rocky Kev

I noticed an typo!

Optimizing Network Optimizing the networking part boils down to 4 main rules:

Only 3 were listed! :-)