This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.

Localize External Resources

Author: Website Optimization.

Javascript widgets are an easy way to add useful functionality to a website. When these widgets are hosted as an external resource, they can produce slowdowns out of your control. This article demonstrates this problem and discusses the solution of locally hosting these widgets.

Increase Website Performance: Useful Techniques for Professional Web Designers

Author: Maria Shehar Bano.

Techniques to increase website performance are outlined in this article. Anyone who has become focussed on a few aspects of performance might like a reminder of these basics. Includes tips to reduce size and load time using tools like front end optimization, sprites and content delivery networks.

When studying performance, you need to watch out not only for performance degradation, but also unexpected performance improvement

Author: Raymond Chen.

When examining performance metrics, the obvious use is to look for degrading performance over time to find bugs and other problems. Not always as obvious is the need to look for sudden performance improvements. If it is unexpected, and unexplained, it could be a problem.

Using RUM to Calibrate your Synthetic Testing

Author: Patrick Meenan.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is being used more frequently to provide user-based performance metrics. These can be combined with the usual synthetic testing to provide hybrid results that are quite useful. Patrick Meenan breaks down the process of working with RUM data in order to build profiles to use against synthetic tests.

Is localStorage performance a problem?

Author: Nicholas C. Zakas.

The localStorage performance debate has been stridently ongoing since Chris Heilmann’s post on it’s poor performance back in March of this year. Nicholas Zakas has discovered previous benchmarking of this tool was flawed. He has taken the time to redo testing to provide accurate performance numbers to help understand the performance aspects of the localStorage tool.

Speeding up PHP-based development with HipHop VM

Author: Drew Paroski.

Facebook has released their work on dynamic PHP compiler improvements as the HipHop VM JIT compilation tool. This impressive work has produced a compiler as efficient as their static compiler, even at scale. The open source project is stored on their public github repository.

Introducing Hystrix for Resilience Engineering

Author: Ben Christensen.

“Applications in complex distributed architectures have dozens of dependencies, each of which will inevitably fail at some point.” [from the ”Hystrix wiki”] Netflix has open sourced their tool for providing resiliency in the complex API by protecting from dependency failure, stopping cascading failures and providing fast fail and fallback. Monitoring, alerting and control round this tool out so it usefully improves uptime with the hundreds of billions of calls per day that it handles at Netflix.

Let’s shard something

Author: Juan Negron.

Setting up sharded clusters in MongoDB can be an hours long task. Juan Negron deploys a sharded cluster in minutes using Ubuntu, Juju and the MongoDB charm. With a video plus detailed steps, this comprehensive page gives you the information you need to save time with this task.