Re: [tlug] Acid drop on mobile?

["David Shanahan" <david@example.com>]

On a related note, I moved all my websites to perlbal recently. I don't
think it supports gzip, but it's astonishingly fast, and it does allow you
to concatenate multiple files in a single request. So, for instance, a site
with five different style sheets can make a single request and get them all
in one go; similarly for _javascript_ files.

Yes, reducing the number of files that need to be downloaded will help a lot
especially over high latency networks. Mobile phones probably generally
have both higher latency and lower bandwidth.

Also adding forward Expires headers to images / css / _javascript_ that are often used
but infrequently changed will encorage browsers and proxy servers to cache
that content. However if you do use far forward Expires headers you may need to update the
URL (filename) whenever the content changes to avoid having clients use stale versions.

I found this advice and tuning tool from Yahoo! to be useful:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

It is a fairly simple add-on to firebug for Firefox that shows the number
and size of all the components on a page, whether they have been compressed
as well as other performance statistics.