A bit older, but both worth a read, and most of this is still relevant today...

https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/...

https://www.amazon.com/Even-Faster-Web-Sites-Performance/dp/...

If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now)

If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap.

If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving stale pages to users. So it has to hit your server every time, in which case the user might as well hit your server. In that case, I don't really see how CloudFlare improves things.

Am I misunderstanding how CloudFlare works? It seems like if you follow typical performance tips like [1] then most of CloudFlare's benefit is eliminated.

I guess [1] does tell you to use a CDN. You can save end user network latency for cached static pages, since they cache them in multiple geographic locations. But if you have a simple site with 1 .js and 1 .css file per page, and compress and minify everything, I wonder if it's worth it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309

How does this (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...) get to be number one, while this http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-... goes nowhere?

Are we upvoting simply by name recognition?

http://stevesouders.com/about.php

He only wrote the book on high performance web sites...

http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/d...

The definitive treatment of every item on that list, and more, is Steve Souders' book (http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/d...) Get it immediately and do what he says. In my experience, the differences are very material.

The one thing I would add is: wherever possible, give resources immutable URLs (that is, when a resource changes, change its URL) and tell the browser to cache them not for an hour but forever. This saves endless wailing and gnashing of teeth on both sides of the browser-cache abyss (i.e. things not being cached when you want them to and -- much worse -- things being cached when you don't want them to). Seriously, this rule changes misery to joy.

p.s. While copying the above link I noticed that Souders published a sequel (Even Faster Web Sites). Who here has read it? Can you report how good it is?

Get the two Souders (creator of YSlow, now works on web performance at Google) books, which are amazing. I'm not affiliated with Amazon.com, O'Reilly or Yahoo!; just like Patrick says, these guys know their shit:

High Performance Web Sites (O'Reilly, Sept. 2007): http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/d...

Even Faster Web Sites (O'Reilly, June 2009): http://www.amazon.com/Even-Faster-Web-Sites-Performance/dp/0...

Half of King's 'Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets' (O'Reilly, July 2008) is devoted to performance, so it's also worth a look: http://www.amazon.com/Website-Optimization-Search-Conversion...

The book (O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers): http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/d...

And his upcoming book (O'Reilly's Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers): http://www.amazon.com/Even-Faster-Web-Sites-Performance/dp/0...