as FAST as REDIFF.COM

how do i make my website as fast as rediff.com

some of the details of my website are
i am using servlet & jsp with

os.name:SunOS (solaris)
os.arch:sparc
os.version:5.9
app.server:WebLogic Server 8.1 SP4
java.version:1.4.2_08

i want to make noticeable change in the performance of my website.

please tell me the tips to improve my website performance (any tips from server side to client side including html, javascript or any other changes required)

That's a very big and general question. I recommend you check out www.javaperformancetuning.com for a nice collection of tips, articles, and other resources.

I took my first look at "REDIFF.COM", and my suspicion is that the site load speed depends largely on the speed of the ad service being used, as it's unclear that there's anything other than ads on the site. Maybe a little paragraph of news or something, somewhere in there.

To seriously improve the performance of your web-application, the first step needs to be to analyze the current bottleneck.

Interesting enough Java is only a piece of the puzzle you are trying to solve. Various stages in getting a web page are
1. Resolve the DNS name for the URL
2. Get the static/dynamic page from the web-server
3. Get other content (style-sheets, images, etc) required for the web-page
(This might require additional DNS lookups)
4. Render the page on the browser

Java/App Server tuning will play a part only in #2

DNS Resolution can be an issue for the first hit

You might want to separate our your static and Dynamic content into separate areas, and set a longer Expires header so the browser does not request it for subsequent hits

Keep the page simple (look at the Google page) so you don't have to make multiple trips to get all the images (Unfortunately most of the poorly designed web pages have lots of images, which slows them down).

Serve static content from a cache close to the end user like Akamai

The size of the web-page will determine how quickly the page downloads

The design of the web-page (number of tables, depth of table nesting) will determine how quickly the page will render after loading

Rather than start at javaperformancetuning.com I'd recommend starting at a tool like http://tools.itscales.com/cgi-bin/pma-dl (you can also use a proxy server and log times and time stamps to do the analysis)

e.g. if you look at the page http://www.citibank.com/us/d.htm (which is what you get re-directed to from http://www.citibank.com)

You'll observe
1. The actual time to first byte (amount of time spent by App server) is very small (less than 0.3 seconds) not even 12% of the total time
2. The web page is quite large (29K) which results in longer time to get the complete page (and probably has an impact on rendering it too)
3. There are large number of images which take forever to load

Now compare this with http://www.npithub.com
Here you can see that the main page (PHP) needs some serious tuning

If you want to continue the analysis look at www.indiatimes.com with a response time of 20+ seconds

I think you should work on small tips and tricks to get your website faster...

<BEGIN RANT>
I disagree. You should find and tune the actual bottlenecks, rather than using a general rule of thumb which might not even apply in your specific case.

There is no subsitute for root cause analysis
</BEGIN RANT>

Regards,

Virag
The Peak of Performance

I think you should work on small tips and tricks to get your website faster...

I think that statement was intended as a joke.

Getting all wound up in tips and tricks is a sure way to lose clarity and maintainability and create mysterious bugs. Do a google search for "premature optimization root" for amusing quotes.
Bill