JS and CSS are killing site performance

[GoogleCodeExporter]

After multiple user complaints of load times, I attempted to increase site 
speed download 10 seconds to under 3 seconds (as measured by webpagetest.org)

Multiple aggressive caching only shaved off the load time.  Upon poking around 
I found the real culprit to be the individual number of JS and CSS files that 
digress.it uses.

From this pretty waterfall loading graph (tinyurl.com/4j6ylot) one can see that 
time spent downloading digress.it's JS/CSS never goes over 1ms.  This 
spreadsheet (tinyurl.com/4l7mqyn from different test than above) sums the total 
time *downloading* all JS/CSS is .033 seconds while time spent *waiting* the 
JS/CSS at 4.2; the majority of the entire page load time.

To put that in perspective, all of the work compressing the text and using a 
CDN saved about ~0.4 seconds while combining the JS/CSS would save ~4.0 seconds.

Post-hoc attempts at combining the scripts with W3 Total Cache result in severe 
site breakages. Perhaps two sets of JS and CSS can be included, one plain text 
version and another pre-combined and minified that can be switched to via a 
preference.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by indoler...@gmail.com on 9 Feb 2011 at 11:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

*actually bothers to poke around code* hmm, not all of it is minified.  Sorry 
if this bug ticket was redundant, I realize you are in add features, not 
streamline mode- which is a /good/ thing.

Would a list of problem CSS/JS be of use?

Original comment by indoler...@gmail.com on 10 Feb 2011 at 7:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

yes! a list would be great. i've kinda lost track of all those lingering css/js 
files.

Original comment by eddie.tejeda on 14 Feb 2011 at 11:58

• Changed state: Verified