The first thing you should do is to see if HTTP Keep-Alive is supported by your server.

Second, and this may seem obvious, but I’ve seen too many developers forget to leave a hint to the browser to cache the results. As a result, the page becomes sluggish due to a feature that’s meant to be responsive.

See what happens behind the scene when you sign up for a new Twitter account. Suppose you try to register the username “wil”, but it’s taken. For each character you type, the browser makes HTTP requests to check that the username in the input field to see if it’s available.

So that’s one for “w”, “wi”, “wil”. Then you find that all 3 are taken. Ok, perhaps time to add a numeric suffix? “wil1″ – nope, delete the “1″, and we’re back to “wil” again. Guess what? Another HTTP request is sent to Twitter for the same string “wil”!

Had Twitter set an “Expires” header to usernames that are taken, the browser wouldn’t have had to make that round trip!

Below are the headers sent by Twitter for the https://twitter.com/users/username_available URI (courtesy of Hurl):

In the case of signup forms, usernames are rather involatile pieces of data, so it’s a prime optimization target. As your namespace becomes more scarce, you’ll tend to have people trying more strange combinations, increasing the number of requests to your servers.

In my case, I’ve applied it to our TLD management platform. Domain names that are registered gets a 10 minute cache timeout value (which is heaps short but good enough to ensure a snappy UI operations). However, with domain names, it’s a lot more volatile but we’re not guaranteeing success at the point of registering a name so anywhere between 1-5 minutes is usually sufficient.

A simple view snippet in Django does the trick and goes a long way to making your users happy.

/ Blogging from a HSDPA connection

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It could reduce loads on the server, but I’m not sure either. Most static content is served very efficiently on the server using the sendfile (2) system call. By mixing static content with dynamic (the HTML which has to know what its embedded objects are), it may be difficult to implement efficiently.

That said, it could have some merits, and a more in-depth analysis would be needed and I’d be interested to see how it pans out.

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