Archive for the ‘performance’ Category.
Recently Google Web Metrics report came across and inspired by my co-worker Stoyan Stefanov’s WTF – Web Testing Framework I decided to build my own ruleset for YSlow using these metrics to check how good or bad pages are compared to Top and All Sites averages.
After a long period of no posts due to personal issues, I’m back now and alive!
This time with a new post on YDN – Yahoo! Developer Network – blog: Performance on Yahoo! Search for Earth Day.
In this post I describe the performance case study of Yahoo! Search Earth Day campaign.
During this long off-post period, besides my day job, I’ve been doing some experiments, developing some tools and brainstorming lots of ideas, mostly related to performance and JavaScript. I do have some post drafts and will be publishing them soon. Here are a few topics I’m covering along this year:
Stay tuned!
This morning while commuting to the office, reading JavaScript for Web Developers, I bumped into a question: how could I improve a well known algorithm that gets the smallest or the largest number in an array by using built-in Math methods such as Math.min and Math.max. For those not familiar with these methods, they return the smallest or the largest number respectively from a list of zero or more numbers passed as parameters, e.g.: Math.min(4,3,9,6) returns 3, Math.max(4,3,9,6) returns 9. I was wondering if calling such methods using apply and an Array as argument would work. I could hardly wait to get to the office to test it out on my Firebug console. I first tried:
Math.max.apply(Math, [4,8,3,5,1,2]);
And bingo! It works!
Performance on the web has always been a hot topic to talk about specially when you talk about page load, but you don’t see as often people talking about perceived load which is related to how fast the interface responds to the user interaction, in this area WebKit based browsers like Safari and Chrome from my point of view have always been ahead.
I’ve just finished chapter 7: Writing Efficient JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas on Steve Souders‘ new book, Even Faster Web Sites, where he presents several string optimization techniques to improve JavaScript performance and wondered which algorithm does String.indexOf method implements on JavaScript engines (aka ECMAScript engines).
A few months ago I’ve asked this question to Yahoo! fellow Douglas Crockford and he said the ECMAScript standard does not require a specific algorithm, so it could vary with each browser. You can check that on section 15.5.4.7 of Standard ECMA-262. I decided then to download the most popular open-source JavaScript engines source codes and found mainly 3 algorithms:
Continue reading ‘String searching algorithms in JavaScript engines’ »