Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it

Some of these tips are really good (using a CDN, caching on basically every layer, using YSlow), but does the author really believe using FPGAs and ASICs for websites is really practical? I've yet to see one real-world report of people using FPGAs to speed up sites. Hell, I haven't even seen any academic proof of concepts focusing on the merits of FPGAs in the web environment.<p>That's not to say that FPGA's won't be useful (they could potentially be helpful for real-time ranking and the like), it just seems out of character to mention something like that on a website scalability site. Grain of salt, and all that.

I think this quote should have been a headline as opposed to an easily missable list item<p>'80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend, so it makes sense to concentrate efforts there before heroically rewriting the backend.'

A bit off topic, but could someone recommend any good articles or case studies highlighting the importance of site design and the potential affect on sales of nuanced site changes (ie: I recall reading an article about how a small change to a checkout process increased sales x%, but can't find that article).<p>I am trying to put together some reading material for a non-technical person in my startup who is unconcerned that our web design company is botching things.<p>(Even if you don't have a specific link, if you remember reading something and can remember the company name or an googleable information, it would be much appreciated).

"Latency is physics, bandwidth is money."