1. jQuery and Web Performance
Dave Methvin
President, jQuery Foundation
Lead Developer, jQuery Core

2. jQuery Foundation
● Maintains jQuery code and docs
● Supports web developers and standards
● Participates in standards process
○
W3C web standards
○
ECMA 262 (JavaScript)
● Hosts conferences (like this one!)

3. jQuery Core 1.11 and 2.1
•
•
•
Shipped last month
We didn't break a lot of things!
"jQuery Served Your Way" ™
o
Support for IE 6/7/8 (1.11) or not (2.1)
o
Custom builds for smaller size
o
Use with node, browserify, or inside apps

4. builtwith.com

5. jQuery Team - World Wide

6. http://contribute.jquery.org

7. PERFORMANCE

8. "JavaScript / jQuery /
browsers are a bad
developer environment!"

9. A poor
workman
blames
his tools

10. How the Programmer Sees It
JavaScript
Browser

11. Web Developer's Reality
Content caching
HTML
CSS
Screen paints
Network requests
Browser
Layout calculation
Image decoding
Keyboard
Touch
Focus management
Mouse
JavaScript

12. Web Developer's Reality
Content caching
HTML
CSS
Screen paints
Network requests
Browser
JavaScript
Layout calculation
Image decoding
Keyboard
Touch
Focus management
Mouse
Optional

13. How Do I Make My Page Fast?
1)Find slow stuff
2)Make it not slow

14. How Do I Find the Slow Stuff?
What you can
measure using
tools today

15. How Do I Find the Slow Stuff?
What you can
measure using
tools today
What you
should
measure

16. JavaScript Loop Optimization

17. JavaScript Loop Optimization
Slowest looping style still only
takes 140 microseconds to do
10 iterations of a loop

18. “Programmers waste enormous amounts of
time thinking about, or worrying about, the
speed of noncritical parts of their programs,
and these attempts at efficiency actually
have a strong negative impact when
debugging and maintenance are considered.
We should forget about small efficiencies,
say about 97% of the time; premature
optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we
should not pass up our opportunities in that
critical 3%.”
--Donald Knuth

19. “Programmers waste enormous amounts of
time thinking about, or worrying about, the
speed of noncritical parts of their programs,
and these attempts at efficiency actually
have a strong negative impact when
debugging and maintenance are considered.
We should forget about small efficiencies,
say about 97% of the time; premature
optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we
should not pass up our opportunities in that
critical 3%.”
--Donald Knuth

20. This Should Be You, 97% of the
Time

21. Finding and Fixing the 3 Percent
•
•
•
Client-side issues often can be solved by
"peephole" optimizations and don't require
massive architecture changes
Many — most! — speedups can be done
near the end of the project (or even after
deployment, cough)

22. Page Load Performance

23. How the Browser Loads Pages
1) Browser fetches index.html
2) Pre-fetcher scans HTML for resources (images, CSS,
scripts) and requests them immediately
3) Browser loads / runs JavaScript when encountered
during parsing (since scripts can write out new HTML!)
4) When HTML is fully loaded and parsed, browser calls
DOMContentLoaded handlers (jQuery .ready())
5) Browser does initial rendering of the page (finally the
user sees something!)

24. Now It May Seem Obvious, But...
•
Resources not already in the HTML file can't
be prefetched, resulting in further delays
o
•
e.g. stuff injected by your JavaScript/jQuery
JS frameworks or initial content rendered
from some client-side templates can make
the prefetcher useless

25. Manual Prefetching
Lets you tell the browser get a running start on
template content or deeper pages in the site.
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="media.mysite.com">
<link rel="prefetch" href="/img/kitten.jpg">

26. YSlow

27. Google PageSpeed

28. modern.IE

29. webpagetest.org

30. Here Are Your Blocking Resources

31. Here Are Your Blocking Resources
Advertising!

32. You Have 16 Milliseconds … Begin
60 frames/second ~ 16 milliseconds/frame
•
•
Long-running operations can make the page
appear "janky" rather than smooth
Really long-running operations can make the
page appear unresponsive to the user

33. It Happens in 16 Milliseconds?
From High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik (O'Reilly)

34. Adventures in Dirty Layout
:visible
:hidden

35. "The Dot That Ate Performance"
console.time("init");
$("body").removeClass("activated");
$("p:visible").css("color", "blue");
console.timeEnd("init");

36. "Hey Browser Can I Bug You?"
30 ms

37. What If We Track Visibility?
console.time("init");
$("body").removeClass("activated");
$("p.visible").css("color", "blue");
console.timeEnd("init");

38. "Never Mind Browser, I Know This"
8 ms

39. Chrome's Yellow Triangle

40. IE11: Layout after offsetWidth/Height

41. Avoiding Forced Layout
●
● Look out for :visible or :hidden
● Minimize document-wide style/class
changes
○
Use data- attrs or jQuery `.data()` if non-stylistic
● Get JavaScript out of the path
○
○
CSS transitions
CSS animations

42. Using Dev Tools Profilers
When JavaScript really is the
problem (or seems to be), a
profiler can find the hot spots.

43. A Real Site: gimmickbook.com

44. What's Wrong?
•
•
•
Stutters during infinite scroll
Seems to get worse as the page grows
Using the jQuery Masonry plugin

45. What's Wrong?
Faster!

46. Forced Layout/Reflow
Chrome's Event tab shows JavaScript has forced layouts

47. Chrome Profile ("Tree")

48. IE 11 Profile ("Call Tree")

49. What Does This Code Look Like?

50. Moral of the Story
Infinite scroll should not be used with
full-page layout algorithms!
In this case, the plugin could be
changed to only lay out the new
items, since nothing above them
changed.

51. You Have the Tools, Use Them!

52. $("#talk")
.find(".useful")
.append(contactInfo)
.end();
Twitter: @davemethvin
GitHub: @dmethvin
IRC (Freenode): DaveMethvin #jquery-dev
Email: dave@jquery.com