Facebook Now 2x Faster, Is It Really?

Yesterday, a Facebook engineer made a blog post under Facebook’s engineering notes outlining the ways some Facebook engineers decreased the load time of Facebook effectively making it 2x faster.  In past I have discussed why page load times are important and it is apparent that Facebook gets it too.  They had been working on these tweaks in performance for approximately six months (June 2009 to the beginning of 2010).

How did Facebook do it?  Essentially the two main approaches included cutting back on JavaScript and reducing the number of cookies transmitted from the server to the end-user.  Other additional methods included using reusable components (built on XHP) for HTML and CSS.  Those reusable components make it so users do not have to re-download the same CSS styles that are used in various parts of Facebook.

While Facebook is claiming the site is 2x faster, it doesn’t appear everyone who uses the site agrees.  Throughout Twitter and Facebook you can sift through the endless complaints of the site being slow.

It is pretty apparent that Facebook may have improved for some users, but clearly, not for the majority of users.  I personally haven’t had any issues with Facebook, but I may just be lucky.

I don’t want to end up having to beg Facebook to not load so slow like the person above so I’m hoping Facebook can resolve these issues.  How is your experience with Facebook and load times?  Leave a comment and also provide your location so we can see if there are any relations to slowness and location.  If you can you may want to also throw in your Internet connection speed.