Question

The Problem and My Question

I am currently trying to optimize a page on my site that returns a large amount of minified JavaScript.

By optimize, I mean speed up 🙂

One of the ways I am trying to speed this page up is by reducing the headers sent to the server by the browser. 24 hours ago I would not have thought this to be possible, however, I have since then discovered a page that does just this and would like to know how and whether it is worth investigating further.

My page is located at https://libraries.sinemaculammviii.com/

The page I am comparing to is https://www.google.com/jsapi

I have used http://tools.pingdom.com to test the speed of both of these pages, and one of the things that clearly shows is the lack of request headers that the Google page sends

How do they do this? Should I be doing it?

Does anyone have any other suggestions as to how I can speed up this page?

I am currently using:

1. gzip to compress the page
2. JSPacker to minify the JavaScript
3. I will be applying caching headers (I have not done this yet)
4. Although this probably wont make a difference as the page is not static, I have routed my site through the CloudFlare CDN

Evidence of the Solution

If you compare the headers (shown in the expanded results) in the following links, you can clearly see that there are no request headers sent by the Google page:

My Page

Google’s Page

UPDATE 1

I think I may have figured out the first step, or at least a possible first step. Is it possible that Apache is just removing the headers?

UPDATE 2

Answer 1

Google speed does not come from the removal of headers, though I am sure this does not hurt. The true speed comes from its modification of the Slow Start Algorithm. For more information – go here: http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html