I’ve been working to improve the performance a large site at Amazon. Steve Souders has written two excellent books that explain browser/http best practices. A few of the rules were new to me and very helpful (flushing/mod_deflate settings, different browser techniques to defer Javascript). The important take-away is that only a small fraction of typical page load time is bottlenecked by the server generation of a page.
High Performance Web Sites (companion site)
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Even Faster Web Sites (companion site)
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My first round of optimizations just went into production and our metric that measures “time from click until critical feature shows up in the browser” dropped from 5.25s to 3.5s. It’s neat to multiply the savings and see that many weeks of end-user browser load time are saved each day.