Mister T: Performance

Windows Vista and Office 2007

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:54:04 GMT

How many of you have installed Windows Vista and/or Office 2007? Have you started browsing Spaces with them? How's the experience? I'm really curious!

Performance Tips

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:48:34 GMT

I know many of you have wanted Spaces to render even faster than ever. It's a good expectation - in my opinion, no web site is fast enough, ever :) There are many things that affect performance, and they differ widely in scope. For example, some issues can be addressed by us, and others can only be fixed with faster servers. Some others may not be fixed easily.

Then there are the things that are within your control. A few things that you, the Space owner, can do, to make your site faster. Here are some:

- Remove things you don't need. This goes beyond the obvious - there is special code on the server that fetches everything you need to render your space, and nothing more. If you have more modules, the server will need to get data for all of them. Take a second look at your space; if you have modules you don't care about, you can hide or remove them. Of course, this is an optimization - if you do need the modules, or find them useful, this is pointless :)

- Consider your permission settings. There is a very good reason for permission settings - they are what protect your Space from unwanted attention. If, however, you don't really have a reason to hide your space from anyone, consider making your space public. Because public spaces render faster. We have made very fine optmizations to render public spaces quickly, with very little server effort. Important warning/disclaimer: Do NOT set your space to public just to experience this optmization - it is there, but it's not anywhere as significant or important as your reasons for keeping your space private or protected. Privacy and security always trump performnace.

- Avoid unnecessarily clearing the IE cache, if you can. We have worked hard to make sure that static content is available for browser caching. If the cache is cleared, any space you visit will render slower, as your browser scrambles to fetch all the images and other static files needed to render the page. Note: There are good reasons to clear your cache - this is just an option to exercise if you don't have to clear your cache, and were thinking of doing it for fun, in case you had no other plans for Friday.

- Avoid deleting your space cookies, if you can. There are many things in the cookies that help the server server the page you're looking at. Think of them as hints to our server. If you delete the cookies, things will still work, but only after making you wait :-)

- Consider our preferred browsers. We have worked very hard to make sure Spaces performs its best under the auspices of Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Firefox. You make the final call, of course. Choose whatever browser you feel happiest with, but do note that our code works very hard with these browsers to be clever about performance.

Let's start work!

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 04:52:00 GMT

This is my business space, where I share aspects of my working life, and discuss topics about my work.

I am one of the developers of MSN Spaces itself, and personally designed and wrote many of the parts of this website. My area of expertise is performance, scalability and platforms. I'm basically the "perf guy," responsible for making sure that this website can stay running when millions of people all over the world bombard it every day when they post photos, write to their blogs, or simply browse and read.

Today, we're the world's largest blogging site. That's right. Not MySpace, not Blogger. It's MSN Spaces. To keep everyone happy in MSN Spaces, the website has some very powerful design artifacts that keep it lean and mean, staying up 24 hours a day.

I'll talk about some of these things in future posts. I'll also share some interesting things about Spaces that you might find pretty cool. For example, how many of you know where your actual blog and photos are sitting right now? Where in the world are they stored? Answers coming up later.

I'm also here to listen to YOU, the Ultimate Critic, about your thoughts and criticism. I don't even care if it's mindless whining. Bring it on! This is the place to talk about your experiences in Spaces. If you have some critiques about our performance, tell me where you've been bitten most, or enjoyed it most. I cannot promise results, but will read what you have to say carefully.