Drupal Front End Performance – Make Your Website Lightning Fast

ABSTRACT:
Tweaking Drupal to squeeze out the last drop is a good idea, but the biggest part of a website's loading time is spent on retrieving CSS, JavaScript and images. To get a truly zippy website, it is therefore vital to drastically reduce the time spent here. In this session, you'll get to know why sites are slow and learn techniques to identify and resolve bottlenecks: From simple Apache tweaks to rethinking your theme so that it can be loaded faster there's something for everyone.

PRESENTERS:
Konstantin Käfer
Khalid Baheyeldin

Session Overview
This lecture-style session will present and discuss various approaches to improve front end performance. While server side performance has an impact on the speed websites are delivered, the vast par of loading time is spent on retrieving CSS, JavaScript and image files. For a truly zippy website, it is therefore vital to drastically lower the amount of time spent here. In his book, High Performance Websites, Steve Souders discusses various ways to accomplish this. This session is based on that book but contains additional Drupal-related information and strategies.

Agenda
- Anatomy of a web page
- Measuring the non-obvious and identifying bottlenecks
- The Hypertext transfer protocol
- Reducing HTTP requests
- Configuring Apache
- Additional optimizations
- Content delivery networks
- Related Drupal modules

GOALS:
You should get a feeling for what "front end performance" actually means and where the main problems are located. You will also learn how to tackle these issues in a structured manner, measure the effects and get to know the basics of the foundation technology of the web, the Hypertext transfer protocol.

SLIDES:
http://www.slideshare.net/kkaefer/front-end-performance