Exceptional Performance

Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team promotes best practices for improving web page performance. They conduct research, build tools, write articles and blogs, and speak at conferences.

Best Practices

The Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practice rules for making web pages fast. They have identified 34 rules which are divided into seven categories.

YSlow for Firebug

Use the YSlow tool to analyze a web pages and get a report on why the web page is slow based on the best practices for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. This tool has been used internally at Yahoo! by many properties (for example, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, and so on) to improve the performance of their web pages by anywhere from 25 to 50 percent. Yahoo! is happy to share this tool with the development community to help others accelerate their users' experiences on their web sites.

Research

Research conducted by the Exceptional Performance team is documented in the following Yahoo! User Interface Blog articles.

• Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests
• Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!
• Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles
• Performance Research, Part 4: Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane
• Performance Research, Part 5: iPhone Cacheability - Making It Stick

Developer Support & Community

Web page performance and the YSlow tools are discussed in the Exceptional Performance Group. Contact this group if you have questions or need technical support.

You can also use the feedback form to report feedback, bugs, and request features.

Videos About High Performance Web Pages

Both general web development and performance-related videos are available on the Yahoo! Developer Network YUI Theater.

Books About High Performance Web Pages

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