Front-end tuning on the paper...

Put some thoughts and aggregate some information on front-end tuning for your reference, it is on my paper, but really want to start with:

Front-end tuning Checklist:

1. Check Memory leak issue on browser side
2. Cache static objects: make use of Etag or Expire headers to reduce the number of 304(Not Modified)requests
3. Combine Javascripts/Css: to reduce the number of requests
4. Gzip: no much to say, we benefit from it a lot(even some issues there)...
5. Compress images: use jpg, Gif, png instead of bmp and something else to reduce the size of images as much as possible
6. Minify Javascript/Css: removing unnecessary comments and white space, to save more Kbytes received. we can only make this experiement on the local performance envrionment not on the dev or QA envrionment, so it does not disturb our normal life
7. Remove any resources no longer exsit which can cause “404 errors” even do not download anything
8. Tune any javascript performance if we had time or gain some experience on that
9. Apache Http server Tuning initiative

What get measured get managed:

Monitoring requests and response data from IE/firefox
1. Using Firebug together with Yslow
2. Using AOL Pagetest
3. Using IBM pagedetailer
4. Using Httpfox
5. Writing Watir automation scripts to measure the end-end response time
6. Task manager(for monitoring the Browser memory usage)

A few awesome books or articles which can be considered as a “CookBook” :

1. OReilly—High Performance Websites by Steve Souders
2. OReilly—Website Optimization by Andy King
3. AST—”Right Click → View Source and other Tips for Performance Testing the Front End” by Scott Barber
http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/drupal/December.Final.pdf
4. javascript tuning tips by Steve Souders :http://stevesouders.com/docs/widget-summit-2008.ppt
5. Apache performance tuning tips: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/perf-tuning.html