We’ve heard from you that performance is important and the Digg engineering team are busy working on making our site load faster. We’ve been moving static resources such as CSS, JavaScript and images to a CDN and testing several providers. We have been converting to high performance distributed databases for key features. We have also significantly improved our use of cache control directives and removed dependencies on 3rd party sites with performance issues.

Today, we’re also making some changes to reduce page payloads and minimize HTTP requests with subtle UI changes. By removing the 16px user icon from stories on the home page and other story lists, we’re reducing HTTP requests to Digg for a warm cache load by around 75%.

This is just the start of the performance initiatives that will unfold over the next few months and will result in order-of-magnitude speed-ups for many use cases.

Cheers,

John.

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”, Mario Andretti