Blog: Posts Tagged ‘Performance’

YUI Theater — Caridy Patiño Mayea: “YUI 3 Loading Strategies: A Yahoo! Search Case Study” (51 min.)

Yahoo! frontend engineer Caridy Patiño Mayea speaks at YUIConf 2010 at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, CA.

A robust loading strategy is one of the most important elements of optimization for high traffic websites. YUI 3′s Loader is both powerful and elegant, and learning how to leverage it is a must for YUI developers. In this YUIConf 2010 session, Yahoo! frontend engineer and YUI contributor Caridy Patiño Mayea (@caridy) provides a technical overview of loading strategies employed on Yahoo! Search.

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By Eric MiragliaDecember 2nd, 2010

YUI Theater — Ross Harmes: “Porting Flickr to YUI 3″ (36 min.)

Flickr Frontend Engineering Manager Ross Harmes talks about the process of rewriting the Flickr front end using YUI 3.

Ross Harmes is the Frontend Engineering Manger for Flickr, which recently completed a major presentation-tier rewrite using YUI 3. He was kind enough to join us at YUIConf 2010 to talk about that rewrite and how he and his team extracted maximum benefit from YUI 3′s various components.

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By Eric MiragliaNovember 19th, 2010

YUI Theater — Philip Tellis: “Measuring the Web with Boomerang” (52 min.)

Philip Tellis discusses the Boomerang open-source performance tool at YUIConf 2010.

Philip Tellis (@bluesmoon) is a long-time Yahoo! and a member of the influential Exceptional Performance team. In this talk at YUIConf 2010, Philip discussed Boomerang, an open-source tool for instrumenting and measuring performance from the end-user perspective.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

  • Dion Almaer, Ben Galbraith, Elaine Wherry, Thomas Sha, Joe Hewitt, Ryan Dahl, Tantek Çelik, and Douglas Crockford: YUIConf 2010 Panel Discussion: The Future of Frontend Engineering — Moderated by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, this distinguished panel explored the near future of the discipline at at a time of great change. Panelists included Elaine Wherry, founder and frontend architect at Meebo; Douglas Crockford, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!; Tantek Çelik, technologist and author; Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js; Joe Hewitt of Facebook, creator of Firebug and one of the most downloaded mobile applications of all time (Facebook for iOS); Thomas Sha, YUI founder at Yahoo!.
  • Alois Reitbauer: dynaTrace Ajax Edition — dynaTrace provides one of the most powerful tools for analyzing the performance of web applications in Internet Explorer. In this talk, dynaTrace engineer Alois Reitbauer walks through four specific analytic scenarios using the dynaTrace interface.
  • Dav Glass: Using Node.js and YUI 3 — YUI 3 and Node.js, working together, help us fully realize the promise of progressive enhancement (and a lot of other cool stuff). Dav Glass of the YUI team shows how it’s done and what’s possible using these powerful tools together.
  • Ryan Grove: Achieving Performance Zen with YUI 3 — Following codified guidelines [http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/] can help you build fast websites, but building applications that are clean, fast and extensible also involves taking a balanced approach to performance at every level of your F2E work. YUI 3 is designed to help you in this process, providing a right-sized abstraction layer with built-in performance magic and a variety of tools that make fast frontend code easy and fun to produce. In this session, we’ll explore the zen of performant JavaScript in the YUI 3 world and introduce you to some of the powerful tools YUI 3 puts at your disposal in every app you write.

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By Eric MiragliaNovember 18th, 2010

YUI Theater — Ryan Grove: “Achieving Performance Zen with YUI 3″ (40 min.)

Ryan Grove speaking about performance and YUI 3 at Yahoo! on September 1, 2010.

YUI engineer Ryan Grove gave a talk recently at Yahoo! in which he laid out a vision for how to approach performance in YUI 3-based applications. The approach is philosophical, strategic, and practical — and it’s the best summary I’ve seen so far of how to think about these issues in the YUI 3 world. If you work with YUI on a regular basis, this is a video you don’t want to miss.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader, click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

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  • Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Scene 6: Loopage — Software development is hampered by a specific set of design mistakes that were made in the first programming languages and repeated in everything that has been done since. And, somewhat miraculously, JavaScript is going to make it right, radically transforming the way we write applications. Again. In the Loop of History, it has all happened before, but it has never happened like this. This is why you should care about the emergence of server-side JavaScript and the excitement around projects like Node.js — not because they’re at the sharp end of a trend, but because they’re paving the road toward the next big revolution in software.
  • Nicholas Zakas and Victor Tsaran: Accessibility on the Yahoo Homepage — Nicholas Zakas, a principal developer of the Yahoo! homepage, and Victor Tsaran’s, Yahoo!’s senior accessibility manager, discuss the strategies and methods that made one of the most visited websites in the world fully accessible. The talk took place at the June 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
  • Dennis Lembree: Making JavaScript Accessible — Dennis Lembree, an accessibility expert and the creator of AccessibleTwitter discusses the challenges of making JS-enabled sites accessible. The talk took place at the June 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
  • Ryan Dahl: Introduction to NodeJS — Ryan Dahl, the creator of NodeJS, introduces the project and talks about performance improvements and new architecture. The talk took place at the May 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.

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By Eric MiragliaSeptember 9th, 2010

High Performance JavaScript from O’Reilly and Yahoo! Press: Free Chapter on Data Access

High Performance JavaScript, by Nicholas Zakas (book cover)Nicholas C. Zakas has teamed with a select group of fellow Yahoo! engineers to produce a new volume from O’Reilly and Yahoo! Press on High Performance JavaScript.

Nicholas’s coauthors on the project include Julien Lecomte and Stoyan Stefanov of Yahoo! Search, Ross Harmes of Flickr, and Matt Sweeney from the YUI team. Subjects include DOM scripting performance, algorithms and flow control, strings and regular expressions, Ajax, and performance optimization tools.

Nicholas and the publisher were kind enough to share a sample chapter with us here — Chapter 2 on “Data Access”. In this chapter, Nicholas begins with a lucid explanation of scope chains in JavaScript and their implications for performance and then looks at different ways of managing data in JavaScript.

One of the classic computer science problems is determining where data should be stored for optimal reading and writing. Where data is stored is related to how quickly it can be retrieved during code execution. This problem in JavaScript is somewhat simplified because of the small number of options for data storage. Similar to other languages, though, where data is stored can greatly affect how quickly it can be accessed later. There are four basic places from which data can be accessed in JavaScript:

  • Literal values: Any value that represents just itself and isn’t stored in a particular location. Java- Script can represent strings, numbers, Booleans, objects, arrays, functions, regular expressions, and the special values null and undefined as literals.
  • Variables: Any developer-defined location for storing data created by using the var keyword.
  • Array items: A numerically indexed location within a JavaScript Array object.
  • Object members: A string-indexed location within a JavaScript object.

Each of these data storage locations has a particular cost associated with reading and writing operations involving the data. In most cases, the performance difference be- tween accessing information from a literal value versus a local variable is trivial. Ac- cessing information from array items and object members is more expensive, though exactly which is more expensive depends heavily on the browser.

You can meet Nicholas and his fellow authors on Tuesday, April 13, when they will be presenting some of their work at a BayJax meetup here at Yahoo!.

By Eric MiragliaApril 7th, 2010

April 13 BayJax Meetup on High Performance JavaScript

Gonzalo has posted details on the April 2010 BayJax meetup, which we’ll be hosting at Yahoo! again next week:

We are back with the first Bayjax meetup of the new year at Yahoo!. This month we are bringing you an extraordinary lineup of speakers on JavaScript performance. In celebration of the newly released book High Performance JavaScript, Yahoo! front-end engineers Nicholas Zakas, Matt Sweeney, Julien Lecomte, Stoyan Stefanov, and Ross Harmes will be covering some of the most relevant topics, tools, and techniques for producing screamingly fast web applications.

Details:

Title: High performance JavaScript
Where: Yahoo! HQ – @URLS Main cafeteria
701 First Ave, Sunnyvale Ca, 94089

Topics:

  • Stoyan Stefanov on DOM Scripting – building responsive UIs by understanding the price of DOM access, updates, reflows and repaints
  • Nicholas Zakas on Response Interfaces – When written incorrectly, JavaScript can slow down an entire page’s user interface. Learn how JavaScript is tied to a web page’s UI, the limits that browsers place on JavaScript execution, and how to ensure a fast and responsive UI.
  • Ross Harmes on Ajax – A quick introduction to Multipart XHR, its strengths and its (possibly fatal) weaknesses.
  • Julien Lecomte – Emphasis on JavaScript build systems and their importance.
  • Matt Sweeney – Matt will be introducing the Tools chapter, which walks through a suite of tools to help developers identify various types of bottlenecks in their system.

YUI Theater will be there…we hope to see you there as well.

Photo of Ross Harmes used by kind permission of Dustin Diaz.

By Eric MiragliaApril 7th, 2010

YUI Theater — Matt Sweeney: “YUI 3 Performance”

YUI architect Matt Sweeney at YUICONF 2009, held at the Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale; October 28, 2009.

YUI architect Matt Sweeney’s (@msweeney) talk at YUICONF 2009 focused on extracting maximum performance from YUI 3. He drilled into the seed file options, lazy-loading strategies, and YUI 3 techniques for DOM and Event interaction that keep overhead low and performance high. He concluded with a review of his internal benchmarks for YUI 3 using the Slickspeed and Taskspeed performance suites.

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By Eric MiragliaNovember 10th, 2009