SkyDrive ships major performance improvements
One of the reasons I've been a bit out of commission lately is all the hard work I put in to the latest SkyDrive release. Along with a few of the other developers, here are some of the things we accomplished in our "Milestone of Quality"
- Fixed a few bugs with the way we handled ETAGs and caching headers
- Made a general way of including css sprites instead of images on the server.
- Added sprites for commonly accessed small images across the site. This reduced some pages from loading 20 images to 5 images.
- Moved all static content to a CDN that supports GZip for both http and https. This should really help our international users, since it brings our images, script, and styles closer to them.
- Enabled GZip compression on all dynamic html content over both http and https. This was done with the built in IIS compression parameters, which I'll post about in a future post.
With all of these changes, we managed to bring our page load times down pretty significantly. I won't go into all the numbers here, but I will say that a typical user's SkyDrive home page went from 17 seconds to 8. Not bad!
For fun, here are some of the sprites you'll see when loading SkyDrive pages:
