Tuning servers, applications and networks

Specialists in making things FAST!

We at phat reaction are specialist in make websites, servers, applications and networks fast. This is of upmost importance if it is your aim to either had substantial visitors or a quick responding system.

We’ve been making sites ultra fast since 1994, so know what we are talking about. Take for example PrizeWize.nl who we speeded up to load faster than 94% of all sites on the internet (alexa ranking stats), or SpeckyBoy.com who we reduced over .5MB of traffic transfer per page and increased page load times by a factor of 4.5, which within the first week made their alexa ranking change from the 2990th to 2865th most popular site on the internet.

Having a fast site makes your growth possibilities almost limitless, never will you be stuck waiting as your servers are overloaded.

More users less bandwidth

By just using http compression and configuring the server not to send the same files (i.e. logo image) to the browser each time a new page is loaded, we can save you up to 75% of the bandwidth. This in turn either reduces your costs at your ISP or increases the amount of concurrent visitors you can receive.

CSS sprites make pages load faster

Using CSS Sprites rather than single images make sites significantly faster and thus making your rank higher on the search engines. By putting all of the images in to one file and referencing them with CSS it is possible to reduce the page load times by 50%, as the client browser does not need to ask again and again for the same information. Each time it asks it makes a complete new request including the DNS lookup. All time wasting stuff.

Reducing your CSS

CSS is the key to the design of a website, but it can also be the thing that makes the website slow. For example it the designer who made the site in the first place used wasteful coding techniques, the CSS could be as big as 3 times the size needed. For example they might put code such as


#logo {
       margin-top: 25px;
       margin-bottom: 20px;
       margin-left: 23px;
}

which could be reduced to as small as


#logo{margin:25px 0 20px 23px}

As you can see this saves significant space in the CSS and will in turn cause the browser to load much quicker.

Of course it does not stop there as there are many other things that can be done to reduce the CSS down to it’s smallest size, not to mention the simple case of “If the design does not need it, don’t send it” principle. Using the classic example of a florist, why send CSS such as the code tag settings when it is not used at all?

Server caching

Both Apache and IIS allow for server caching, the process by which it saves the most viewed pages in memory or on a quickly access disk for faster retrieval than going back to the ASP.NET or PHP.

Back end db server tuning

Again the database server and its communications can be tuned to increase throughput or make store procedures run faster. This process is taken on a case by case basis, starting with the hardware configuration and moving forward through all of the OS and drivers, bringing them up to a level where they function best.