davgit / whichloadsfaster

Pages compete head-to-head in your browser to see who's the fastest.

Which loads faster? (developer's corner)

Users don't care about testing methodology. 
They just want to know which loads faster.
So put the pages next to each other, and let them duke it out.

Ok, and we'll send them to more in-depth tools as well. :)

Blog post explaining some of this madness.

Hacking

Everything is client-side, and you can hack and test right from your local filesystem. Just open the static directory and have at it.

Source Graphics

Were done in OmniGraffle.

Deploying

So, I'm not made of money for spare bandwidth and you probably aren't either, so let's make everything with a far-future expires header and auto-version all our static content. We'll do this by appending the SHA1 hash of each file's contents to its filename so that whenever it changes, the user will be directed to get the new resource.

There's an example configuration for apache in static/.htaccess that does the far-future expires.

There is a Makefile to build and static-ify the site. It requires:

• openssl (for generating file hashes)
• google's closure compiler (for compiling and minifying javascript)
• yui compressor (for minifying css)
• htmltidy (for minifying html)
• markdown (for generating documentation)

Contact

There's a mailing list, which I expect could end up being more user-oriented. I'll create a dev list if necessary.

You can reach me at [email protected].