Chapter 1. High-speed websites
This chapter covers
- The impact website speed has on business
- The performance cycle
- The Performance Golden Rule
In South Africa, the Zulu have a proverb: “Even a small ant can hurt the mighty elephant.” Many animals are unable to harm the thick skin of the elephant, but just one ant can crawl into its trunk and cause chaos.
Have you ever opened a website and experienced a long wait (think slow, plodding elephant), waiting for all of the elements on the page to load? As you are waiting, imagine what an army of small improvements could do to make your website faster. Within the wider open source community, there are myriad books about web page performance. But in the .NET community, this remains an evolving area with much of the knowledge scattered about the internet. In this book, I hope to give you tools and tricks you can use to improve the speed of your .NET website, one step at a time.