Web application speed is paramount. Our users want our application and they want it now! We can optimise application code, database queries and so on, but that's all wasted if the page takes ages to appear. A fast back end and a slow front end can end up leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

Using Rails, we'll look at the best ways to speed up the delivery of your application. Going beyond just minifying our assets, we'll look at techniques to get our site in the user's browser quicker, improving both real and perceived speed. We'll also discover the best tools to use to check out speed and get a better idea of the user's opinion of the site.Once finished, our sites will load in a flash!

Links from the slides:

HTTP Archive trends: http://httparchive.org/trends.php

Tools

WebPageTest Google PageSpeed Insights Yahoo! YSlow

High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik Perception of speed DOM, CSSOM and JavaScript

Rails guides on gzip compression

Serve gzipped assets on Heroku: herokurailsdeflate rack-zippy

CSS and the critical path: Patrick Hamann on CSS and the critical path The Guardian team load CSS from localStorage Critical path CSS generator

Lossless compression of images: Asset pipeline preprocessor paperclip-optimizer carrierwave-imageoptimizer

Progressive JPEGs: Book of Speed image_optim

Inlining: rails-sass-images