Speed Up Your JavaScript

Google Tech Talk
June 4, 2009

ABSTRACT

Web Exponents: Speed Up Your JavaScript
Presented by Nicholas C. Zakas.

As an interpreted language, JavaScript is filled with hidden performance issues that conspire to slow down your code and ruin the user experience. Learn exactly what is fast, what is slow, and what you can do to squeeze that last bit of performance out of your JavaScript code.

Nicholas C. Zakas is the author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 2nd Edition (Wrox, 2009), co-author of Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition (Wrox, 2007), and a contributor to Even Faster Web Sites (O'Reilly, 2009). Nicholas is principal front end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage and is also a contributor to the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library.

The Web Exponents Series is hosted by Steve Souders

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• javascript
• web
• exponents

[nathan87]

i laughed at THE DOM too! humourless google employees...

[keemor]

Very pragmatic presentation, real situations with solutions which are measured and tested. Nicholas Zakas is a great speaker for me. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!

[Blinkwing]

42:00 At first I thought it was Steve Wozniak

[gremlack]

I mean, things like changing `while (j<len)` to `while (j--)` might be 2x as fast when `process(item)` does nothing, but, its unlikely that the while condition is going to be your performance bottleneck. Unless you're doing it a few hundred thousand times

[davidgraycn]

terrific lecture. but a question: what is the funny thing about the DOM?

[wesw02]

Things like using 'j--' as your loop condition to reduce evaluations or storing a deep property as a local variable to reduce look up (var name = object.name.name) may help you squeeze a little more performance out of your app, but there is something to be said for code readability. IMHO, in most cases you should not sacrifice code readability for performance, especially in a large app. Many of the performance issues discussed are problems with browser engined, not the JS apps.

[MrDotMontage]

i dont understand javascript. i would like to know how to read and write it but there are no beginner tutorials.(starting from the begining)

[flowewritharoma]

pretty programatic lecturing talk! thanks through communicating bilateral intelligence.

[htmlmm]

@keemor Only few tech talk or Google videos has the quality of this video. Straight to the point, and which every other talk was this easy to understand for beginners. He is good!

[DragonForceF0REVER]

Eight members of MS IE team watched this video.

[ssoonn88]

just to note, documentFragment looks awesome and I was never aware of it, but it seems it still doesn't keep up in ease and speed of the old innerHTML