25 August 2015 0 comments Web development, Mozilla
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.