It’s the speed geek’s favorite time of the year – so I am bookmarking some links for later use 🙂

Starting from the 2014 performance calendar and jumping from link to link:
1. HTTPS and web performance: SSL server test, HSTS header, cache, keep alive, etc…
2. Is it fast yet?

TLS has exactly one performance problem: it is not used widely enough.
Everything else can be optimized.

3. High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik – made available by O’Reilly for free.
4. High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites by Steve Souders
5. Improving Smashing Magazine’s Performance: A Case Study

And some names in the web performance field:
Tim Kadlec
Ilya Grigorik
Steve Souders
Stoyan Stefanov

1. Custom templates for request debug output

Use case: you want to temporarily enable debug output in a production environment (ex – to determine the cause of a specific performance problem), but you obviously don’t want the users to see the debug information.
Solutions:
– restrict debug output to your IP only (if you know exactly who is behind your IP), but it will still introduce a performance problem (the IP has to be checked for every request)
– create a custom debug template (*) – example logging.cfm instead of classic.cfm and log all the details you need instead of outputting
– create an empty debug template (silent.cfm), then create a component with a main logging method based on the classic.cfm debug template. Call this main method onRequestEnd to log all the needed details.

(*) A custom debug template can be created and placed in the WEB-INF/debug ColdFusion folder. The classic.cfm template can be used as starting point.
More info: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/116-finding-template-execution-stack-in-coldfusion.htm

2. When a ColdFusion template cannot be found

Use onMissingTemplate and return a 404 HTTP error code. Let the web server handle the error:

<cffunction name="onMissingTemplate">
    <cfargument name="targetPage" type="string" required="true"/>
    <cfheader statuscode="404" statustext="Not Found">
</cffunction>

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