Hi!
<3 enthusiasm :)
This is not a website "http://en.wikipedia.org", is a redirection to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Can't "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" be served from "http://en.wikipedia.org%22?
Our major entrance is not via main page usually, so this would be a niche optimization that does not really matter that much (well, ~2% of article views go to main page, and only 15% of that are loading http://en.wikipedia.org/, and... :)
The CSS load fine. \o/
No, they don't, at least not on first pageview.
Probabbly the combining effort will save speed anyway.
Yes. We have way too many separate css assets.
A bunch of js files!, and load one after another, secuential. This is worse than a C program written to a file from disk reading byte by byte. !!
Actually, if a program reads byte by byte, whole page is already cached by OS, so it is not that expensive ;-) And yes, we know that we have a bit too many JS files loaded, and there's work to fix that (Roan wrote about that).
Combining will probably save a lot. Or using a strategy to force the browser to concurrent download + lineal execute, these files.
:-) Thanks for stating obvious.
There are a lot of img files. Do the page really need than much? sprinting?.
It is PITA to sprite (not sprint) community uploaded images, and again, that would work only for front page, which is not our main target. Skin should of course be sprited.
Total: 13.63 seconds.
Quite slow connection you've got there. I get 1s rendering times with cross-atlantic trips (and much better times if I get served by European caches :)
You guys want to make this faster with cache optimization. But maybe is not bandwith the problem, but latency. Latency accumulate even with HEAD request that result in 302. All the 302 in the world will not make the page feel smooth, if already acummulate into 3+ seconds territory. ...Or I am wrong?
You are. First of all, skin assets are not doing IMS requests, they are all cached. We force browsers to do IMS on page views so that browsers would pick up edits (it is a wiki).
Probably is a much better idea to read that book that my post
I'm sorry to disappoint you but none of the issues you wrote down here are any new. If after reading any books or posts you think we have deficiencies, mostly it is because of one of two reasons, either because we're lazy and didn't implement, or because it is something we need to maintain wiki model.
Though of course, it is all fresh and scared you for life, we've been doing this for life. ;-)
Domas