Twitter Talks Performance Boosts

This week twitter announced that it was implementing some changes to improve performance on twitter.com. The company is focusing on increasing the speed and optimizing operations for improved performance. Twitter notes that its September 2010 update centered on web application architecture to push all the UI rendering and logic to JavaScript running on the user browsers, but that limited support for optimizations available on servers.

The company says the latest update takes back control of the front end and improves performance by moving rendering to its servers. That move away from user browser rendering to rendering on the server dropped the initial page load times for twitter.com to 1/5 of what they were previously. Faster speeds are certainly a big deal, other changes are more likely to be noticed by the users. One thing is that the Permalink URLs for twitter no longer use "#" known as the hashbang.

The reason for the move away from that is because the browser needed to download an HTML page and execute some JavaScript recognize the hashbang path. The elimination of that tag means pages load faster so you can read tweets quicker. Twitter also made changes to minimize the amount of JavaScript used so there are fewer lines of code to parse and execute equating to faster load times. The company says that the new architecture is rolling out across the site right now and once the pages are running on the new foundation additional speed tweaks will be implemented.