Comments on: Making web-pages go faster using PHP

By: Kai Sellgren

Kai Sellgren — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:02:16 +0000

If we are talking about having the website to load up fast for the user, then 14 kB vs 102 kB is not a big deal nowadays. However, 2 requests vs 24 requests is a big deal.

By: mrclay.org » Archive » Minify getting out there

mrclay.org » Archive » Minify getting out there — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:37:02 +0000

[...] Eran Galperin is using Minify in his startup Octabox (the site screams) and wrote a nice Minify deployment guide. [...]

By: Steve Clay

Steve Clay — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:09:14 +0000

@Arik, you're right, pre-encoding files to cut PHP from the client request cycle is one of Minify's goals, but it's already pretty fast. The ab testing I did on my (admittedly wimpy) servers showed that Minify served files at least faster than Apache alone with mod_deflate. mod_deflate seems to compress on every request.

By: links for 2008-11-18 | Yostivanich.com

links for 2008-11-18 | Yostivanich.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:30:42 +0000

[...] techfounder » Making web-pages go faster using PHP Built in minification of CSS and JS without needing to change your code. (tags: programming javascript html performance webprogramming xhtml php optimization minify) [...]

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:53:19 +0000

What you suggest is yet another method for static deployment of files.

Actually, no. Michael’s suggestion is to have apache (rather than php) serve the file from the cache if it exists, otherwise it is generated, cached and served by php.

This cuts the php interpreter out entirely for the common case.

By: Eran Galperin

Eran Galperin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:59:30 +0000

Hi Michael,
What you suggest is yet another method for static deployment of files. In my post I described a dynamic way to serve scripts, which depends on the parameters sent to the minify script. As I’ve told Arik, this is of course possible if this is the route you want to go.

By: Michał Bachowski

Michał Bachowski — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:51:59 +0000

Hi!

Why don`t you use .htaccess?

HTML:

.htaccess stored under /path/to/min/ directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?files=$1 [L]

and minifying script should produce file called “script_one.js,script_two.js”. So the PHP wouldn`t be involved in further serving this file. And if you want to refresh the cache- just remove this file

Regards

p.s. sorry for doubled comment, but HTML tags were stripped out

By: Arik

Arik — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:32:36 +0000

Well, I agree regarding premature optimizations. I guess that my comments should be headed twords the developers of Minify. Maybe I should submit a patch that works like Rails caching…

Anyway, keep up the good work!

By: Adam Benayoun

Adam Benayoun — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:14:45 +0000

If it’s running that smooth in Israel (and Eran you know how bad routing can be between USA-Israel) Then I wonder how’s the UI would be served in the US

Probably faster than your local development server.

By: Eran Galperin

Eran Galperin — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:48:33 +0000

There is always room for improvement. However I strongly believe in the rule that 97% of the time, premature optimization is the root of all evil

True, there is some overhead for invoking the parser just to see if a file exists – but its in the millisecond range. Will it ever become significant? that’s hard to tell. In addition minify does more than just serve the files – it configures far-future and Etags headers and saves us the trouble of dealing with those.

For now it’s very helpful to have the same process in development and production. When the time comes that we decide that offline deployment to static files is needed, we’ll go that route.

We’re very glad Octabox is running smoothly for you btw we did put extra effort to make sure the server is in top-notch condition