Web Performance Digest: May 2012

Every month, we update our Web Performance Hub with the latest and greatest articles, posts, and presentations from around the web performance community.  

This month's Web Performance Digest features 13 new links. Read all about the latest from Facebook, which dominated recent headlines both for their eventful IPO, their rumoured browser purchase, and their infamous outage. Elsewhere, find out who recognized Strangeloop as one of 100 Brilliant Companies!

Other links include:

The 3 white lies behind Instagram's lightning speed
The "secret sauce" behind Instagram's stellar user experience is rooted in a combination of coding tricks aimed at giving users a feeling of constant responsiveness. Find out how their site "always pretends to work."

The average web page is now 1 MB
Showing 8% growth in just four months, the average size of a webpage is now 1042 kilobytes (KB) as of May 1, 2012. At current growth rates, how long until the average page hits 2 MB?

Who is the fastest online payment processor?
Think PayPal is the fastest online payment processor? Think again. Data pulled by New Relic from 20,000 enterprise customers has revealed a few surprises on the performance of major payment platforms.

How to regain control of rogue third-party content
Why are some companies willing to rack up hefty CDN tabs only to have the gains nullified by slow-loading third-party scripts? Site Optimizer solves this problem by allowing site owners to control how, when and if third-party scripts are permitted to load.

Web performance can be beautiful too
After performing poorly in a 2011 web performance comparison of leading retailers, Crate and Barrel made WPO a priority moving forward. Find out just how "beautiful" their performance has been in 2012!

Check out the rest of the Hub and see hundreds more links to the best selection of performance-related resources on the web. (Have we missed something? Send us your link recommendations!)