Performance implications of Bundling and Minification on HTTP/1.1

We just published a blog [1] analyzing the performance implications of content optimizations such as bundling and minification on the performance of web pages. The data shows that by applying bundling and minification along with compression and pipelining it is possible to get significant gains in the time it takes to get the content necessary to render a page as well as the overall time it takes to download the data.

Not only does optimizing the content save bytes but it also has savings in the number of requests and responses that need to be processed as well as faster render times due to being able to retrieve the HTML, CSS, and JS up front. In the test evaluated, the speedup was from 638 ms (uncompressed, unbundled, unminified, and not pipelined) down to 146 ms for the equivalent compressed, bundled, minified, and pipelined content. However, by just looking at the data necessary to lay out the page (HTML, CSS, and JS but not images), the time went from 631 ms to 126 ms with the images being finalized within the remaining timespan from 126 to 146 ms.

It is the hope that this data can contribute to providing a baseline for evaluating HTTP/2.0 proposals compared to how an efficient HTTP/1.x implementation can perform while leverage optimizations throughout the stack to provide better user experience.

Comments welcome!

Thanks,

Henrik

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/henrikn/archive/2012/06/17/performance-implications-of-bundling-and-minification-on-http.aspx