Blog Tags: 
admin
tuning

Reducing the load on a small VPS by 80% in 5 minutes

Liraz Siri - Tue, 2010/06/08 - 11:46 - 7 comments

A few days ago I noticed the average load on a newly setup VPS was too high relative to its workload. The server was noticeably sluggish. Load was high and a page the wiki it was running would occasionally take 10 seconds to load.

I didn't have too much time to kill but I decided I would at least try picking off the lowest hanging fruit before upgrading to a beefier, more expensive plan which would cost a few hundred dollars extra a year.

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Blog Tags: 
encoding
tuning
web

PNG vs JPG: 6 simple lessons you can learn from our mistakes

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/04/26 - 10:29 - 7 comments

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.

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