1 Web Performance

What do we mean by 'web performance'? From the viewpoint of one user, the crucial value is the time it takes from requesting a page (by clicking a link or button, or typing in an URL) to having the page displayed and interactive in your browser. We will call this the 'response time'.

From the publishers point of view it might also encompass the question of how many users you can serve (with acceptable response time) on a given server. If you look at the question of how to serve more users in case of more demand you enter the realm of 'scalability'. This is a more advanced question that goes beyond the scope of this guide.

1.1 Myths About Performance

If you have never studied this subject you might still have an intuition about where performance problems come from. Many beginners are fascinated by details of their programming language like: will using more variables make my program slower? or is string concatenation faster than string interpolation?.

These 'micro optimizations' are hardly ever necssary with modern programming languages and computers. Using Rails, Postgres and a modern hosting service you will have no trouble serving hundreds of users a day and achieving adequate performance for all of them.

Trying to 'optimize' you code if there is no problem, or if you don't know where the problem is, will make your code worse, not better.

Donald Knuth stated this quite forcefully:

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Donald Knuth

Only after you have measured the performance factors that are relevant to your project, and only after you have found out which part of the system is causing theses factors to go over the threshold of acceptable values, only then can you truly start to 'optimize'.

1.2 Measuring Web Performance

The "exceptional performance group" at Yahoo published the browser addon yslow in 2007. It measures performance and displays the timing of the different HTTP connections as a "waterfall graph":

(Image from Steve Souders talk at Web 2.0 Expo in April 2008)

Each bar is one resource being retrieved via HTTP, the x-axis is a common timeline for all. The most striking result you can read from this graph: the backend is only responsible for 5% of the time in this example! 95% of time is spent loading and parsing javascript and css files and loading and displaying images!

This graph was later integrated into the built in developer tools of several browsers, and into the online tool webpagetest.

Firefox

Chrome

1.3 Rules...

Yahoo first published 14 rules for web performance in 2007, based on the measurements back then:

• Make Less HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Avoid empty src or href
• Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
• Gzip Components
• Put StyleSheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions...
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript and CSS
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicate Scripts

Even with changing browsers and protocols some of these are still very valid today. But as a web developer you should always keep an eye on the changing landscape of web performance! These rules and their priority will change!

1.4 Less HTTP Requests?

Making less HTTP Requests was a main goal in performance optimization for many years. Many JavaScript files were combined into one, the same for CSS. Icon Fonts were used to combine many small image files into one file.

On the other hand the HTTP protocol itself was improved again and again, to make repeated requests to the same server "cheaper":

• HTTP/2 server HTTP requests can be multiplexed over a single TCP connection
• HTTP/3 uses UDP instead of TCP

In 2022 HTTP/3 is supported by all common browsers except safari and use by about a quater of the top 10 million websites.

So today this "first rule" for avoiding HTTP requests can be relaxed.

2 How Rails helps with Performance

The Rails asset pipeline was introduced in Rails 3.1 in the year 2011. It automates handling static assets:

• Compile to CSS (e.g. LESS, SASS)
• Minify and combine several CSS files into one
• Compile to JavaScript (e.g. typescript, babel)
• Minify and combine several JavaScript files into one
• Optimize images
• Create several versions of pixel images
• Create CSS Sprites

There are two main folders:

• you put source files in app/assets/*
• you configure which files are built and included in app/assets/config/manifest.js, app/assets/stylesheets/application.css and app/assets/javascript/application.js
• files for publishing are created in public/assets/*

The second folder will be served by the web server directly, without going through the Rails stack. The expires header for these files is set to a far future date.

2.1 Rails Environments

The Asset Pipeline works differently in different Rails Environments. There are three environments that exist by default:

• development
  • this is the environment you have been working in until now,
  • it is optimized for debugging, shows error messages and the error console.
• testing
  • this is used for running the automatic tests.
• production
  • this is how the finished app will run after it is published,
  • it is optimized for speed and stability.

How each envirnoments behaves is configured in files in config/environments/*.rb.

The development environment is used by default on your machine. If you deploy to heroku or to another hosting server, production will be used there.

2.2 development Environment and the Asset Pipeline

In development the asset pipeline will not write files to public/assets. Instead these files will be created on the fly, and not be conactenated. The two lines in your Layout:

# app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "application", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>

Will each result in a number of links. Here an example from a real project:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/asset-files/search-a01b0css?body=1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/asset-files/slider-974d5css?body=1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/asset-files/static-7fe63css?body=1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/asset-files/token-input-f5febcss?body=1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/asset-files/wizzard-9a065css?body=1" />
<script src="/asset-files/jquery-4075ejs?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/jquery_ujs-f9f4ajs?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/portfolio/portfolio-78775js?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/swfobject-40913js?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/jquery-uploadify-702eajs?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/application-d7727js?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/can-custom-c11b4js?body=1"></script>
<script src="/asset-files/easySlider-6386djs?body=1"></script>

2.3 production Environment and the Asset Pipeline

When you deploy to production, you deployment process will run rake assets:precompile, which generates the files in public/assets, including public/assets/manifest-md5hash.json.

If you look at the generated HTML code on the production server, you will only find two links (plus some code to handle IE 8): in production the many css files have been concatenated into one application*.css, and all JavaScript files have been concatenated into one application*.js:

<link href="/assets/application-dee0187.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" />
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
  <link href="/assets/application-ie-d369224.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->
<script src="/assets/application-c51a73.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

You can also try out the production environment on your own machine:

• start the web server: rails server -e production
• rails console: rails console -e production
• other rails commands: add RAILS_ENV=production at the beginning or the end of the command.

2.4 Fingerprinting for better Expiry

The filenames mentioned in the last chapter all contain a part that seems random:

• you named the file slider.css
• but it shows up as slider-974d585dcb6f5aec673164664a4e49d5.css

Where do the extra characters come from and what do they mean?

These extra characters are the "fingerprint". It is computed from the full content of the file. If only one byte changes in the file, the fingerprint will be different.

This enables a neat trick with the expiry of the file: You can set the expiry time to infinite, every browser can save the file forever and never try to reload it. If the contents of the file change, a new file with a new fingerprint in the name will be generated, and the HTML-page will link to that file.

This way we avoid one the the two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation.

3 User Generated Content

The asset pipeline handles assets that are added by developers during development. Images uploaded by users in production are handled by activestorage.

4 Further Reading

• Souders(2007): High Performance Web Sites. O'Reilly. ISBN-13: 978-0596529307.
• Souders(2009): Even Faster Web Sites. O'Reilly. ISBN-13: 978-0596522308.
• The Web Performance (Advent) Calendar new every year