14 DAY TRIAL // Broadband speeds are always increasing, computing power is increasing and bandwidth costs are falling so it would seem that developers can afford to skimp a little on the speed and optimization of their sites in favor of more features. But practice proves that users are as concerned as ever about speed and developers are taking notice. Digg has just unveiled the first steps in a broader plan to increase the site's performance and improve loading times, which include design tweaks but also the move of some of the content to a Content Delivery Network.
“We’ve heard from you that performance is important and the Digg engineering team are busy working on making our site load faster. We’ve been moving static resources such as CSS, JavaScript and images to a CDN and testing several providers. We have been converting to high performance distributed databases for key features. We have also significantly improved our use of cache control directives and removed dependencies on 3rd party sites with performance issues,“ Digg’s VP of Engineering, John Quinn, wrote on the site's blog.
The technical solutions should improve the performance of the site significantly in some cases and CDNs are becoming increasingly appealing especially for the larger sites as they can decrease costs and improve responsiveness by hosting some of the content, in Digg's case the graphical elements and the client-side code, in locations closer geographically to the user.
But the high-tech solutions can sometimes be outperformed by some good old-fashioned optimizing. Digg implemented a very small tweak to the site which proved to provide a big performance boost. By removing the small avatar images that showed up next to the name of the user who submitted the stories, Digg was able to reduce “HTTP requests to Digg for a warm cache load by around 75%.” And this just by removing a 16 pixels image. Users’ avatar will still show up on the story pages, just not in the homepage and story lists. The social news aggregator plans to implement further performance tweaks in the coming months.