Speeding up Web 2.0 applications

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My experience with web 2.0 applications is limited to Live.com homepage (www.live.com) and Start.com. In my experience, start.com was generally faster than live.com. There are various reasons for this, but one of the main ones is the amount of JavaScript code we download. Start.com was a much smaller site compared to live.com. We also have some other cookie related features in live.com that slow it down a little bit.

The first release of live.com was very slow. We improved it a whole lot by doing more processing on the server and actually rendering the basic blocks as html, instead of rendering everything using JS on the client side.

I read a paper today from Microsoft Research - Code Splitting for Network Bound Web 2.0 Applications that contains a lot of great information about splitting JS files so that we download only what we need. We applied some of those principles on live.com, but didn't nearly do enough. Chalk it up to experience, I guess :). Anyway, the point of this post is to point people to this paper. It is well worth a read, and we could all benefit from faster web applications.

- Venkat

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