Performance

In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, I wanna go fast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJGsSuFRIg]. When I launched Pwned Passwords V2 last week [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/], I made it fast - real fast - and I want to talk briefly here about why that was important, how I did it and then how I've since shaved another 56% off the load time for requests that hit the origin. And a bunch of other cool perf stuff while I'm here. Why Speed Matters for Pwned...

I tweeted this the other day, and the internet was not pleased: > HTTPS is slow. No - wait - is it HTTP that's slow?! https://t.co/T49GG7oCaK pic.twitter.com/cfnYOpXMWc [https://t.co/cfnYOpXMWc] — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 8, 2016 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/751317949349130240] In fact, a bunch of the internet was pretty upset. "It's not fair!", they cried. "You're comparing apples and oranges!", they raged. No, it's not fair, the internet is not fair. But that's just how the web i...

As I’ve written in the past [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/micro-optimising-web-content-for.html], I put an awful lot of effort into making Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) fast. Not just a bit fast, blisteringly fast and that includes when it’s under a huge amount of load [https://www.troyhunt.com/2014/09/10-things-i-learned-about-rapidly.html]. But there was something bugging me with the site when it came to performance and it was this: That’s right, 33 images loa...

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]I had a little problem last week. I built a very small website [http://haveibeenpwned.com] – really just a one pager with a single API – whacked it up on an Azure website and then promptly had a quarter of a million people visit it in three days. Uh, bugger? Ok, what’s behind the...

I’ve had a lot of conversations with folks recently about web app performance. Often these conversations have been around the assertion that a content distribution network (here forth referred to as a CDN), is something you need to deploy early on in the optimisation process of a website. Personally, I see a CDN as a last resort; it’s what you turn to when all other performance tuning alternatives have been exhausted and you need to eke out that last little bit of latency by moving the content c...

If we can get over Microsoft’s cheesy catchphrase [http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=8f01d2e5-0c99-4780-9d1d-e40000179b0e] for a moment, the whole idea of “to the cloud” is actually pretty cool. It’s the promise of taking things that used to be both labour and capital intensive, commoditising them and serving them up on demand. This can very easily sound like PowerPoint presentation rhetoric so let’s move past the warm and fuzzies and actually see it in action. A couple...