Ajax Performance

On spam and comments

Since switching to Google hosting for my personal e-mail, all of my Wordpress ‘comments pending approval’ e-mails have been silently going to my spam folder. I just finished digging through the 4000 messages that queued up. Damn comment spam.

Apologies to those whose comments were delayed. I’ve corrected the e-mail issue, and I’ll do a better job of staying on top of comment moderation from now on.

Worst. Santa. Ever.

At my parents’ house in Charleston for Christmas, and someone broke into our garage and pilfered our cars. The only thing they stole was my iPod, but I need to get a replacement before making the 16 hour drive back to Boston.

Despite that annoyance, Merry Christmas to all! I have a number of updates I’ve queued up to post, and my New Years resolution is to clear that buffer.

Tab soup

I’m an inveterate RSS consumer, and I use the NetNewsWire+Firefox work-flow. I am also one of those people who can’t stand to have a message (in a news reader, an e-mail client, etc) marked as unread, so I tend to pop open a new tab for every new article, assuming I don’t have time to read it immediately. I almost never have time to read things immediately.

The net result tends to be a cyclical model where the number of open tabs builds over the span of the work week, starting of a low around 10 or 20 and ending somewhere around 100. Anything beyond 100 tends to put me into a danger area where Firefox will slow to a crawl, explode, etc. Over the weekend I go through a purge process, using some of that downtime (and the much lower velocity of incoming news articles) to read my way through most of my backlog.

Right now, I have 154 tabs open. That is a personal record and well outside of tolerances. Firefox may blow at any second. I have no time to get this down to a reasonable level between now and Friday, so I think I have no choice but to ride this thing out.

Back at full strength, playing catch up

I got the joyous call that my laptop was ready for pick-up yesterday, and we’ve spent the last 24 hours getting reacquainted. It’s amazing how much cooler and more stable a system runs with 2 working fans instead of 0. I queued up a few links of interest during my forced hiatus (note: I could, of course, have blogged from another system, but it just didn’t feel right). You know that means: bullet time!

• From Julien Lecomte of the ever active YUI team comes YUI Compressor, a new JS minification tool built on Rhino. Early returns show a significant performance gain over existing tools in the space, though speed limitations make this tool appropriate for ahead-of-time, rather than on-the-fly, compression. Comments on Julien’s blog show a few bugs turned up by early adopters, but that’s to be expected at this stage.
• Let’s stay on Yahoo! for a moment, shifting to YSlow. Jeff over at Coding Horror took a critical look at the new Firebug plugin in an article titled “YSlow: Yahoo’s Problems Are Not Your Problems.” While careful not to discredit Yahoo!’s methodology, Jeff worries that the advice embodied by YSlow can lead developers down the path of unproductive or potentially dangerous optimizations, particularly in cases where the YSlow guidance is more appropriate for very large sites.
• I made a bit of hay pre-iPhone release by playing iPhone Ajax apologist. Two months in, how do I feel? Well, I’m still hopeful that iterative improvements to iPhone Safari will make it the development platform I was expecting, but performance numbers such as those turned up by Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory worry me. We can’t expect developers to embrace the iPhone fully, despite the heroic efforts of Joe Hewitt, if native code on the iPhone holds such a huge speed advantage.
• I was going to talk about this article, but it really deserves its own post

Finally, I spent a chunk of time this weekend working on an article for IBM developerWorks. Expect more information as it gets closer to publication, assuming it doesn’t totally suck.

Pain and sadness

Today I relinquished my beloved MacBook Pro to the hands of a local Genius. Some hardware needs replacing, and they don’t know how long it will be. I knew that this day would come eventually, but I can’t say I was emotionally prepared.

The important thing is to put one foot in front of the next and just keep living. That’s all I can do.

I got it!

Activating my iPhone now. I will post some observations once I make them. Some of them may even be performance related.

Upcoming Presentation: The Ajax Experience, Boston

The first presentation I ever gave was at TAE Boston last year, and I’ll be there when it returns October 24-26 of this year. I live in Boston, so this is certainly the easiest for me to attend, and the Ajaxian guys bring in a great crowd.

I got jacked :-(

In the great Dreamhost password leak of early June ‘07, some clowns replaced my happy Wordpress install with some trash. Looks like we were offline from some time this afternoon until now. All better, and it gave me an excuse to upgrade to WP 2.2.

Upcoming presentation: The Ajax Experience

I just received word that my presentation proposal was accepted for The Ajax Experience in San Francisco on July 25-27. The presentation topic is “Ajax Performance Analysis.”

I presented at The Ajax Experience in Boston last October, and it is easily my favorite conference series. The Ajaxian guys are great, the roster of presenters is awe inspiring (present company excluded), and the attendees tend to be with organizations pushing the bounds of the web experience. It’s a great crowd.

Homeward Bound

We’re packing up the car for the 15 hour drive (Google Maps tends to be pessimistic) from Boston to Charleston, SC. I should have some time to post and respond to comments between now and the New Year, but today and next Friday will be consumed by the drive.