Written By: Virgil Carroll
Posted: 10/9/2012
Performance can have a huge impact on usability and user experience, and there are several components that could be slowing your site down. Testing your site’s performance is easy and will show you exactly what can be optimized to improve performance (see Tips 65, 66 & 67 for some specific methods on optimizing performance).
Transcript+
Speaker 1: When you’re building a SharePoint site, whether it’s publishing or in internal Intranet or whatever it might be. One of the things that you always have to worry about obviously is performance. How do we tell if we have some negative performance, maybe because some of the assets we put on there, like images and links and Java Script files and those kinds of things?
What we need to do is do some kind of testing. Now there’s a lot of tools out there that you can use for this. The one I’m going to use today is Firebug, one of the tools that I’ve used for a long time. It’s actually a plug-into to Firefox, but you can also use the IE tools that come built in part of Internet Explorer Nine. There’s other products like Http Watch. Basically, the reason we use these tools is these tools are able to help us look at exactly how things are loading onto a page. If there’s something that’s taking them on-off a lot of time and something that we want to be worried about.
Again I want to go back to an example that I used earlier where I talked about the big images. We know for a fact that this has a really big image on the page. I’m going to go ahead and load this page up. What you’re going to find is as it loads up you’re actually going to see all the different elements load up here on the page down in my Firebug there, where I can look at it from across the board. You’ll see that I actually had all these different elements load up in there. This also gives you an idea of all the different things that actually load up on a page that can actually affect the performance of a SharePoint site.
You see everything from graphics to different versions of pictures to Java Script files to the Cascading Style Sheets to all the different things that actually load up. One of the things you see that’s very apparent here is you see here’s our style sheet and you’ll see that that entire thing took 134 milliseconds, so about 1.3 seconds for that entire thing. One of the things you’ll know right away is that here’s that image that we have there, the big image on the page. Look at that. That’s actually taking 985 milliseconds. You can see that this actually gives you some really great feedback there. You can see that it was actually waiting for almost 344 milliseconds and receiving for almost 641. We would obviously note that, see that this is a lot of image and we want to be able to do something about it in there.
Let’s go ahead and look on to the good side. Let’s go ahead and run the same thing and let’s see what we get here. Here you’ll actually see we still get a rather sizeable version, 188 milliseconds, but you’ll see it’s now 188 milliseconds versus over here where it was 985 milliseconds. You see that actually makes a huge difference in optimizing the images. Overall what we’re really trying to show is that we’re looking for things and we’re using these tools to be able to actually be able to evaluate and be able to look at how different elements load on our page. Maybe we need to go back and optimize an image or we need to go back and clean up the style sheet and shrink up the style sheet or a lot of different things like that.
This tool can really help you, or tools very similar to it can really help you look at these problems, trying to figure out exactly where your issue is in loading up a page and do something about it. Even if your page loads fine, remember again especially if you’re dealing in scenarios where you have global users and you have all those people that may have hard times. Even saving a few milliseconds is going to make a huge difference on somebody’s download time.
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More About Virgil
Virgil Carroll is the owner and president of High Monkey – based in Minneapolis Minnesota. Virgil also wears the multiple ‘hats’ of Principle Human Solutions Architect and SharePoint Architect.
Virgil is one of those rare individuals who can dive deep into technical topics while speaking clearly to the business owners of a project and never forgetting that the end user experience has the highest priority. He calls it using both sides of his brain. Virgil is passionate about leveraging technologies ‘out of the box’ as much as possible with a focus on the strategic use of content to create websites that deliver the right content to the right audience on the right device at the right time. Virgil brings high energy, an ironic wit, and a sense of grounded perspective whenever he speaks to an audience. Virgil regularly speaks at conferences and user groups throughout the United States and occasionally in Europe.