<div><span style="color: rgb(160, 160, 168); ">On Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Edward Caissie wrote:</span></div>
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<span><div><div><div><div>On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Doug Stewart <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:zamoose@gmail.com" target="_blank">zamoose@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite"><div>
<div>Speed and performance optimization is a complex problem that has no<br>
specific set of solutions and said solutions can vary greatly based<br>
upon your hosting situation.</div></div></blockquote></div><br>This is the key to the issue, aside from the additional points @James offered, how would be insure a "level playing field" to use the benchmarks suggested?<br>
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</div><div>I don't think it'd be hard.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm guessing from these replies that you're not too familiar with YSlow and PageSpeed? These tools and their motivation are somewhat revolutionary: Yahoo and Google realized that much a user's perception of a site's speed is not server-side configuration per se, but rather things under control of the theme (in WP context).</div><div><br></div><div>So, the values could be advisory. But I further believe they could be mandatory. Because Both YSlow and PageSpeed give clear "grades" of a web page along with very specific instructions on how to improve them.</div><div><br></div><div>Here's a great example: the results for the online demo of News, the theme that gave me trouble:</div><div><br></div><div>https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=http_3A_2F_2Flocallylost.com_2Fnews&mobile=false</div><div><br></div><div>You can see that it scored 42 out of 100. That's the lowest I've score I've personally seen it give. And click on the very first "high priority" item - "Combine images into CSS sprites":</div><div><br></div><div>https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=http_3A_2F_2Flocallylost.com_2Fnews&mobile=false&rule=SpriteImages</div><div><br></div><div>Page Speed is showing the exact problem that brought down my server.</div><div><br></div><div>Prior to this, I've only seen it go down to 70 - and that was for some *slow* sites. For comparison, TwentyEleven out of the box gives 78.</div><div><br></div><div>So as you can see, there's a lot of room for an objective measurement which is independent of server config. Say, for example, a minimum of 70 would raise a flag, but 60 would be a hard reject. </div><div><br></div><div>Robb</div>