This morning Matt Mullenweg posted a link on Facebook to a video on blip.tv where he explains his thoughts on interface/server performance.

Watch the video first, then read my response to his Facebook “fan” page:

Your performance parables are dead on. I said “no” to most of the code in my theme files. First to go was the archives and calendar, from what I can remember. Optimizing it for years now. My style.css is maybe 10-15 lines, I even pull comments, anything to save resources/bandwidth. Like you, this isn’t my first rodeo, I know the value of a few bytes here and there, even today. For SEO too.

I’m fairly confident I could serve 1,000,000 pageviews (per month) from Media Temple’s basic “gs” account. I bet your fav-icon guy was at Dreamhost because Media Temple has a control panel that makes you immediately aware of the fav-icon issue, each file on your site is scored with a resource-consumption metric to make you aware of these problems very quickly. This is why I left Site5, they didn’t have any facts/metrics to explain why they kicked me off a shared server after years as a customer.

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At a recent O’Reilly Velocity Conference, Marissa Mayer makes this point too, it all adds up:

The Billion Dollar HTML Tag « Data Center Knowledge

Google tested pages offering 20 or 30 results, which added between 0.4 and 0.9 seconds to the load time. The outcome: users seeing the page with 30 results would up conducting 25 percent fewer searches, a trend which could equate to billions of dollars of lost revenue.