Drupal 8 is going to have better front-end performance for anonymous users out of the box: it is now smart enough to no longer load unnecessary JavaScript. It’s also (finally!) going to cache all entities efficiently, so that it doesn’t waste time rerendering the same content over and over again.

Because less time needs to be spent on generating the HTML, the page will show up faster on visitors’ devices — also mobile devices.

However, you of course still want pages to be personalized. Different visitors have different permissions (and hence different contextual links), different interests (and hence have “new” or “updated” indicators in different places), and so on.
In Drupal 8, we’ve introduced the necessary foundations to easily serve the same HTML (well, >90% the same — i.e. the most expensive parts), yet still personalize the page by using client-side caching (localStorage/sessionStorage) in combination with clever client-side cache invalidation.

Furthermore, we finally have pluggable CSS and JavaScript optimization (aggregation), where you can easily plug in a specific JS minifier, or data-mining-applied-to-visitor-navigation-paths-powered CSS/JS grouping (to calculate globally optimal groups)!

The end result: really fast websites, with superb perceived performance!

Note: where possible, I’ve explained how to achieve the same in Drupal 7.

Slides: Building really fast websites with Drupal 8Conference: DrupalCon PragueLocation: Prague, Czech RepublicDate: Sep 24 2013 - 14:15Duration: 50 minutesExtra information: 

See https://prague2013.drupal.org/session/building-really-fast-websites-drupal-8.

This was also presented at DrupalCamp Leuven on September 14, 2013: http://leuven2013.drupalcamp.be/session/building-really-fast-websites-drupal-8. Recording available on YouTube.

It was presented again at Drupal Developer Days Szeged 2014 on March 28, 2014: http://szeged2014.drupaldays.org/program/sessions/building-really-fast-websites-drupal-8.

• WPO
• performance
• Drupal