performance

Spectra 2.12 performance regression (update: due to AI assistant)

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So I like and use (aka “ultimate addons for gutenberg”) on some of my WordPress sites.

If you use Spectra as well, you might want to be know that Spectra 2.12 has a significant performance regression, sucking in almost all of wp-includes/js/dist.

Here’s hoping this was not intentional and that it’ll get fixed soon 🙂

More info in https://wordpress.org/support/topic/2-12-significant-performance-regression/

Update Feb. 15th: the regression is due to the new AI features, as a workaround go to Spectra -> AI features -> Manage AI features and disable “AI Assitant” (and “AI Copilot” if you don’t need/ want that either).

Autoptimize cache size: the canary in the coal mine

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another-canary-in-a-coal-mineCopy/ pasted straight from a support question on wordpress.org;

Auto-deleting the cache would only solve one problem you’re having (disk space), but there are 2 other problems -which I consider more important- that auto-cleaning can never solve:
1. you will be generating new autoptimized JS very regularly, which slows your site down for users who happen to be the unlucky ones requesting that page
2. a visitor going from page X to page Y will very likely have to request a different autoptimized JS file for page Y instead of using the one from page X from cache, again slowing your site down
So I actually consider the cache-size warning like a canary in the coal mines; if the canary dies, you know there’s a bigger problem.
You don’t (or shouldn’t) really want me to take away the canary! 🙂

My take on “Web design in a Retina world”

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I read an interesting article on Johan Ronse’s blog about how to design (or is it “develop”?) for a Retina world (Retina being Apple’s marketing speak for high pixel density screens, but you guys knew that). I’ll be honest, I’ve not followed up on all the Retina-buzz, if only because this performance-nut isn’t particularly happy about the sudden need for higher quality images being shoved down people’s data-throat (same with webfonts actually). Because, after all, 14Mb really isn’t “nothing” Johan, given the average webpage is around 1.1Mb.
What seems to be missing in the few articles I did read up until now is this; why do we want to deliver high resolution images to high pixel density screens to users on a broadband connection (assuming we can keep others safe from these high fidelity images, but that is doable)? Because it looks better? Maybe, but what purpose does that serve? What purpose does your site serve? Do you want people to stick around and return, reading your stuff for a long as possible? Or are you in the ad displaying business? Maybe you sell products or services? The question is; how are Retina-ready images going to impact your KPI’s?
Let’s assume those nice crisp images will have a positive impact on your site’s usage and/or ad views and/or sales and let’s also assume (although it is a proven fact rather than an assumption) that the longer download time will have a negative effect on your business. Given these two assumptions; which one will have the biggest impact? My hunch would be the negative impact of longer download time, but I’m biased. The answer to that question really depends on your KPI’s, on your business and on the technical implementation.
The only sound advice anyone could give: do multi-variate testing, compare your KPI’s for your site with and without Retina. Going Retina might help your business, it might harm it. I for one am not switching to Retina any time soon, I don’t see the need for it from the safety of my ivory performance-tower. I’m biased, you know.

100000 WP YouTube Lyte downloads and beyond

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Feeling proud: WP YouTube Lyte got downloaded for the 100000th time today around 16h30;

In the meantime I started work on version 1.2.0, the main new feature being support for responsive design. It will probably be released in the 2nd half of July, unless you want to beta-test that is.
Anyway, thanks for all the downloads, here’s some Underworld (“Glam Bucket”) to chill out to on this lazy Sunday evening:

Underworld Glam Bucket
Watch this video on YouTube.

Speed matters: re-evaluating WP YouTube Lyte’s performance

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So stupid me made a (smallish) mistake when working on 1.1.0, which caused WP YouTube Lyte (rapidly approaching 80.000 downloads, thanks guys & girls) to load immediately instead of waiting for the “document loaded” event (lazy loading). That got fixed in 1.1.2 (which also loads the CSS differently, resulting in 1 file less to request), but the mistake did get me to re-investigate performance.
Exactly how fast is WP YouTube Lyte nowadays? I fired up some webpagetest.org IE9-instances in the Amsterdam node to compare this WP YouTube Lyte powered post on my test-blog with an identical blogpost with default YouTube embedded video. These are the jury’s results for the fastest of 10 runs in both cases (click on the image to actually see the details):

The main figures to compare (normal YouTube embed vs WP YouTube Lyte):

  • time till document complete: 1.612s vs 1.047s
  • time till fully loaded: 4.358s vs 1.385s
  • total number of requests: 13 vs 9
  • combined size of requests: 446 KB vs 77 KB

So using WP YouTube Lyte instead of normal YouTube embeds results in less files to download, less data to transport, the page being ready for interaction quicker and having everything loaded a whole lot faster. These figures are for a single YouTube on a page, but the impact is all the more important if you have multiple video’s on one page (e.g. a category or tag-page for “music” or “videos”) off course.
The full comparison based on 10 tests on both pages:

YouTube embed (full results)Lite YouTube Embed (full results)
doc completefully loadeddoc completefully loaded
min:1612380810471385
median:1918463111911524
max:3221511020782881

So there you go. When in doubt, check these stats and then go install WP YouTube Lyte, because after all speed matters!

Choosing a CDN in a whim

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I had to look into CDN’s some time ago, to find a suitable temporary solution for a problem at work. There are a lot of players in this field, Akamai and Amazon (Cloudfront) being market leaders of some sort, but there’s also Microsoft with their Azure CDN (which we already had some experience with), other big guns such as Rackspace and Level3 and specialized shops such as CacheFly, CDNetworks and NetDNA as well. So how to choose?

Results only relevant for Belgium (and even then …)avg. speed (ms) for 64kBspeed delta % from fastest
softlayer121.3100%
gogrid123.0101%
microsoft azure132.0109%
level3132.0109%
amazon cloudfront133.3110%
maxcdn136.7113%
cotendo138.7114%
cachefly147.3121%
rackspace156.3129%
highwinds226.3187%
voxcast227.7188%
flexiscale317.3262%
amazon s3 eu417.3344%
cloudflare
invalid result		575.0 NA474% NA
google appspot668.0551%
voxel nl814.0671%
amazon s3 us932.0768%
voxel ny942.0776%

Well, if you’re in a hurry, you could compare price and features via cdnplanet.com. The info might not always be complete, but it does give you a good first idea and you can always visit the CDN’s proper site for more details, can’t you?
After comparing features & pricing, you really should get an idea of the speed of these CDN’s, of their performance relative to your customers. I found this CDN Speed Test on cloudclimate.com very useful; it performs a live test of approximately 20 CDN providers, requesting a 64 kilobyte file 10 times for each CDN from within your browser. So if you can get a sample of your customers to perform that test and provide you with the results, you’ll have some very useful information about performance. Together with your overview of features and price, you should be able to make at least a vaguely educated decision, no?
To have an idea about performance for our market (Belgium), I asked some Facebook-friends to provide me with the results of the CDN Speed Test. Most data I received was for Telenet or Skynet/Belgacom, not coincidentally the biggest ISP’s here. You can see the aggregated results in that ugly table on the left (or a couple of paragraphs up, if you’re subscribed to the RSS-feed).
My conclusion: as I was looking for a pay-as-you-go (no obligations, no monthly fee) CDN for static files, with support for Origin-Pull, HTTPS and some administration features (for example to purge the cache and watch nice graphs), MaxCDN fit the picture pretty well. With a great introductory price ($40 for the first Terabyte and even less if you find the coupon code) and performance that is at 113% of the fastest competitor, they seem to have found somewhat of a sweet spot for my specific context.
The only problem; I’ve got to wait for a “GO” from some people higher up the food chain. Maybe I should already implement it on my blog, just for the fun of it?

Firefox Mobile: the best mobile browser no-one uses

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I’ve always enjoyed riding the Firefox-bandwagon and that hasn’t changed, even though Google Chrome seems to be the browser of choice amongst the cool kids nowadays. And if only because I’m a faithful guy, I’ve been running Firefox Mobile ever since I bought a Samsung Galaxy SII as well. Sure it doesn’t do Flash, but I’m not that Flash-inclined anyway.
Now, I haven’t met too many people that use Firefox Mobile and indeed when reading about mobile browsers, Firefox is rarely if ever mentioned. But what if I told you that Firefox Mobile is by far the best browser on mobile when taking performance, features and security into consideration?
I won’t beat around the bush, here’s the pretty objective data.

browserhardwareSunspiderv8 benchm.html5test score
Firefox Mobile 9bSamsung Galaxy SII1421.9ms832314
Android 2.3 browserSamsung Galaxy SII3454.4ms369177
Android 4 browserGoogle Galaxy Nexus1983ms1387230
Mobile SafariiPhone 4s2260.9ms368296
Opera Mobile 11.5Samsung Galaxy SII1699.9ms461285
Dolphin HD 7.2Samsung Galaxy sII3593.4ms318177

Some remarks:

  • the hardware is pretty comparable; all dual-core CPU’s and plenty of RAM.
  • higher is better, except for Sunspider which measures time (in microseconds).
  • I’ve got no screenshot or URL of the google v8 test results on my phone, but I’ll be glad to reproduce.
  • sunspider and v8 are javascript performance benchmarks.
  • html5test is an indication for support of “modern” browser features (html5, css3 and much more).
  • the features of the browser GUI arent’t measured byhtml5test, but I’m pretty pleased with Firefox Mobile in that respect as well; great tabbed browsing, plugins (including noscript!), sync-ing of all relevant data between desktops & mobile, …
  • I added Opera Mobile and Dolphin HD to the list. Opera’s not too shabby but not a winner either?

And last but not least; as Firefox Mobile isn’t native and since it’s on the same (crazy) rapid release cycle as the desktop-version, I consider it to be a lot more secure when compared to the slow evolving, rarely updated native browsers in Android and iOS.
My advice; if you’re an Android-user and you’ve got a recent handset or tablet, you really should consider switching to Firefox Mobile. It’s the best mobile browser no-one is using! Except for you?

Do you know Amazon EC2 & simpledb?

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I’m all of a sudden developing a keen interest in Amazon EC2 & simpledb (or RDS), but Google AppEngine might be an acceptable alternative. Do contact me if you have hands-on experience with webapps developed for and deployed on those platforms, or if you know someone who does. We could be in for a fun little project! 🙂