For the convenience of the Windows developer community, I periodically compile the Zopfli and Brotli compressors from source, building for Win32 and code-signing the binaries (Interested? Get Zopfli.exe and Brotli.exe). After announcing the latest build on Twitter, I got an interesting question in reply: While I try to use the latest compiler (VS2015 U1), I’veContinue reading “Getting Started with Profile Guided Optimization”
Category Archives: perf
Fiddler and Brotli
Regular readers of my blog know how excited I am about Google’s new open compression engine, Brotli. Support is in Firefox 44 Nightly already and is expected for other browsers. Because Brotli is used inside the WOFF2 font format, many clients already have the compression code and just need to expose it in a newContinue reading “Fiddler and Brotli”
WebP–What Isn’t Google Telling Us?
Beyond their awesome work on Zopfli and Brotli, Google has brought their expertise in compression to bear on video and image formats. One of the most interesting of these efforts is WebP, an image format designed to replace the aging JPEG (lossy) and PNG (lossless) image formats. WebP offers more efficient compression mechanisms than bothContinue reading “WebP–What Isn’t Google Telling Us?”
Ad Publishers–A TODO List
Where’s Google’s* blog on how they’re doing everything they can to make ads they serve as fast and small as possible? Where’s Google’s blog on how many ads they’ve nuked as “deceptive” and trumpeting how policy forbids ads for “adware-wrapped” installers? Where’s Google’s blog about how many billions of ad-generated dollars they’ve supplied to contentContinue reading “Ad Publishers–A TODO List”
Brotli
2022 Update: Brotli is requested by 94% of browsers, offers great performance, and works amazingly well on Web Assembly code. If you’re still using GZIP today, you should update! Regular readers of my blog know how much I love Zopfli, Google’s compression engine that often shrinks output by 5% or better when compared to theContinue reading “Brotli”
Tuning MemoryStream
By day, I build the Fiddler Web Debugger. I’ve recently started integrating telemetry collection into the application for automated exception reporting and to collect information about the user’s environment to ensure that Fiddler testing environments match real-world usage. The data is fascinating (and I’ll probably blog more about it later), but one data point inContinue reading “Tuning MemoryStream”
Zopfli All The Things
I’ve written about Zopfli quite a bit in the past, and even wrote a tool to apply it to PNG files. For fun, I had a look at one of the most optimized pages in the world: Google.com, through the lens of Zopfli. Here are the basic resources delivered by the Google homepage: This breakdownContinue reading “Zopfli All The Things”
Photoshop and Save For Web
Adobe recently announced that “Save for Web” in Photoshop is a “legacy feature” which won’t be improved. I decided to have a look at Adobe Photoshop CC (2015.0.0 Release 20150529.r88 x64) to see the impact of its many different “save” commands on the resulting file size. First, I created a trivial 20×20 image and drewContinue reading “Photoshop and Save For Web”
Content Blocking: Unintended Consequences
Our company uses a web firewall device called IronPort to attempt to block unwanted network traffic; it blocks access to known phish and malware domains, and, more annoyingly, domains thought to be related to gaming or “questionable” topics (e.g. politics). Whatever. Today the IT department pushed a new rule set which blocks some requests to domains likeContinue reading “Content Blocking: Unintended Consequences”
Optimize PNGs using PngDistill
Unfortunately, many PNG image generators opt for minimum compression time, failing to achieve maximum compression. Even worse, the most popular PNG generation tools often include huge amounts of unnecessary metadata that can bloat images by thousands of percent! Fiddler now includes PngDistill, a simple tool that removes unnecessary metadata chunks and recompresses PNG image dataContinue reading “Optimize PNGs using PngDistill”
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