Thoughts on radically improving web performance

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If you're a web developer, you definitely owe it to yourself to read the Instant email: how we made Hotmail 10x faster post on the Inside Windows Live blog. Go ahead and read it - I can wait.

You see, with the right techniques, it's possible to provide a very, very compelling and performant experience for users. That translates into happier, more productive users.

I found it reassuring to read the post because although Hotmail doesn't use datajs, it still leverages some of the same techniques we used when we set out to develop a APIs to help improve web performance:

  • Caching. datajs provides a store API suitable for caching different kinds of data by the application, and a cache API that is suitable for large, slowly changing collections.
  • Pre-loading. The cache API support prefetching out of the box, which makes the typical use case much faster for end users.
  • Asynchronous operations. datajs was built from the ground up on purely asynchronous operations. The store, cache, networking and OData components are all asynchronous, and so the user interface is never blocked.

Enjoy!