A while back I wrote a blog post about loading my homepage in 1 HTTP request. As I said back then, this was only an experiment, but as promised I have done some testing to see if this was any use at all.

A short repeating for those who does not want to read the whole (previous) article: The front page of this website is loaded in 1 internal HTTP request. All images, CSS, media queries, javascript are in one flat HTML file, served directly from the server cache. So, then you open your inspector and find out google makes 2 requests, and I have the twitter feed loaded async. OK. But 1 internal.

First, let me explain how I did the tests. I did it locally (so network lag should not be an issue), and with phantom js, a headless webkit browser. So this should mean that the page is fully loaded in a browser at the times presented, and that it's not just the request that is done. I also did 1000 runs on each setting, just to have a lot of numbers. I never tried it going back to normal images instead of base64 encoded though. Should probably do that too at some point. Anyway, here are the results:

Tags: planet drupaldrupal 7performanceexperimenthttp requestscachingfront-end performace