Sirdude turned me on to the YSlow application:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

I just started playing around with it, looking at my web pages.

Anyone ever analyze your Threads board with this?

Any do's or dont's to be aware of when it comes to optimizing a Threads page, based on YSlow's recommendations?

main thing i get from YSlow is to use Expires tags. all threads get an 'F' grade for that.

yahoo also recommends distributing your includes over multiple locations, which ain't gonna happen -- so they ding you for it in their overall grading system.

they then pop you for not compressing .js and .css files.

so it's perty hard to get a grade of 'A' from them.

it's still interesting info, though and they have some good recommendations on where to be including .js and .css in proper order.

btw, this site got a grade of 'D (65)'.. which indicates to me that it isn't a grade that indicates true site performance.. but merely how close to what yahoo would want

It whines about:
1. No expire header.
2. The Google Adsense javascript.
3. My JS/CSS files aren't on a CDN.

Straight A's other than those on my articles script that I've spent months working on...

I was able to get a 99 on my portal page, so it IS possible. Through its recommendations, I enabled and setup mod_deflate and far future expiration in Apache. I also minified ubbt's js files. Sure the minification saved just a little bit of size, but every little bit helps. mod_deflate was able to shrink my portal page by 75%. UBBCentral uses it to shrink theirs by 90%, so as you can see, it's a great thing to use.