Website optimization - minimization, sprites, etc.

Question

I am looking at the product Aptimize Website Accelerator , which is an ISAPI filter that will concatenate files, minimize css / javascript and more. Does anyone have experience with this product or any other all-in-one solutions?

I am interested to know if something like this will be good long-term or will manually configure all the components (integrate YUICompress into the build process, configure gzip compression, configure expiration headers, etc.). be more helpful?

An all-in-one solution looks very tempting, as it can save a lot of time if our site is less than optimal. But how effective are these products? Will creating components manually create better results? Or will the gap between an all-in-one solution and manual component tuning be so small that it is negligible?

Answer 1

To get started, I think you will find all in one pretty well. But over time, if your site has a certain degree of complexity, I think you might find that you want more control.

For example, I use some JS files that cannot be reduced due to the javascript format inside it (note that this is a third-party file that I do not want to modify). Therefore, control over what is being “processed” is extremely important.

In another case, we use, as a rule, to combine our JS files with the help of a script manager that creates ashx pages. As far as I know, this is not all “all in one solution”. In addition, the script manager is already changing the headers according to the cache settings that I configure for it.

Another example of compression is that if you have a lot of traffic depending on the type and size of the separated content, you want to use different compression levels. I think I remember the post by Jeff Atwood saying that they went through for SO and that they needed a lot of control over the compression.

Another example is caching. Feature, if you want to get into the caching of donuts or donuts, it has nothing to do with IIS and all about how everyone can cache different parts of the page - for example, it can cache the main page, but not the dynamic content of the page itself ... afaik no 'all in one solutions' satisfies this.

In general, I generally think that I need more control over what is happening, and I prefer that some kind of minimization occurs during the build process (as you know exactly what you get when you ever launch your application ) Compression happens at the IIS level, but I like to manage it at the APP level. Any cases for caching or compression I just manage through a web configuration that allows a lot of control. Therefore, I think everything goes in one, if you have something simple, but if you need more control, you still have to do it in the application.

Hope this helps.

UPDATE:

Just thought that installing all these things at the application level is very simple if you use ASP.net MVC, but in classic ASP.net it can be a lot harder to combine headers, etc. Therefore, in some cases, if you are dealing with an old application using classic ASP.net, it may be easier to use all in one solution.

Answer 2

I do not know if this is still an issue that interests you or is still considering. This is what I have been interested in for many years. I found that many of the client-side web page optimization methods (we are not talking about server-side / db optimization) are fairly straightforward and not incredibly technically complex. The challenge is simply to keep up with all the best practices as your site evolves. This is especially difficult in teams of large and busy teams. I found it easy to not handle or get all the headers right, because you are focused on getting functionality out of the door for the upcoming release.

So, I think that an all-in-one solution can be useful if everything is done correctly, but probably never ALL EVERYTHING, but more like "INDEPENDENT" in one. Each site is different, and I don’t think the perfect one size fits any solution.

However, I recently published my own open source project aimed at this problem called RequestReduce . This is a work in progress and does not include JS merge / minify. It is FREE and designed to optimize pages with minimal coding interference. My vision is that it leaves your code alone. This can change it, but in itself and without disrupting functionality. Also, during dev, everything should be the same as you left it. This solution, currently merging / minimizing css, automatically handles background images, optimizes the colors and compression of these images, and optimizes the caching of headers generated by css and sprite files. It works with any IIS-based site. I plan to add js minify / merge, foreground image optimization and writing and html rating. It works in multi-server environments and with CDN. I work at Microsoft, and although this is my personal project, which I have been working on at the time, I used it for some MS properties, such as the Visual Studio gallery and others.

In any case, I hope that I do not look too much like a seller. I am not making any money here. I want people to try to do this, because I think he can offer a lot, and I would like some reviews and even contributions to make him better.

Answer 3

Please view Helicon Ape http://www.helicontech.com/ape . As an all-in-one solution, it includes many scaling features, such as URL redrawing, SEO optimization, proxy server, GZIP compression, disk / memory caching, website and server protection, etc. . You can easily try the full-featured license for 3 websites.