Crash-stats just became a whole lot faster

tl;dr Crash-stats is Mozilla's crash reporter dashboard. Simply fixing the static assets made the site 25% faster.

Before http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150820_X5_V5T/

After http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150824_7F_1C3Q/

(The "First Byte Time" is still terrible but that's for another discussion. We're working on a re-write of the underlying data model for that particular report.)

• Note how the SpeedIndex dropped from 2823 to 2098 which basically means, you can see stuff sooner.

• The Load Time used to be 5.7 seconds on average. Now it takes 3.5 seconds.

• It used to weigh 717 KB to load the whole thing. Now it weighs 326 KB.

The only thing we changed was a long overdue correction of static asset headers and Gzip compression. Now, files with unique URLs (e.g. /static/CACHE/css/23a811f100bc.css) have maximum aggressive cache headers. And now all .js, .css and text/html is Gzipped.

Was it easy to do? Hell no!
Does it matter? Hell yeah! We don't have a lot of users or traffic on these reports but the people who use them do this for a living and making the site feel snappier for them would make their lives more productive.