Page load times are important. Amazon insiders estimate that every 100 ms increase in latency costs Amazon roughly %1 of profit.

Simply put: visitors hate slow sites, so don't make them wait.

Unfortunately, many web sites, including this one up until recently, are slowed down by inefficiently encoded images. Note that there are many other components to page load times and if you're looking to optimize your web site you should analyze and understand all of them. But today we're just going to focus on the images.

I recently published ec2metadata which provides a simple CLI and Python interface to the metadata of an Amazon EC2 instance. In that post I mentioned that "one of the most useful pieces of data is user-data, which can be used to pass configuration information or even initialization scripts to the instance upon launch".

I received a couple of responses by email asking for more information, so here it is.

We've just pushed out a maintenance release for the 2009.10 appliance batch featuring:

• Bugfixes for all outstanding issues (we're out of beta baby!)
• Security updates
• Simplified free subscription to Amazon EC2 AMIs
• New and improved Amazon EC2 AMIs

Keeping it simple, HTTPS is a combination of the HTTP and SSL/TLS protocols, which provides encryption while authenticating the server. The main idea is to create a secure channel over an insecure network, ensuring "reasonable" protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks.

HTTPS assumes that special CA (Certificate Authority) certificates are pre-installed in web browsers. If your SSL certificate is not signed by one of these CA's, the browser will display a warning: