I should do this more often. Look at the wealth of information returned in the headers:
1) They're using nginx (which is powered by Ponies!)
2) The site is fronted by varnish with a ttl of 1 hour, of which there appear to be at least 4 varnish servers.
3) Links to the various CSS files. Do browsers actually use these headers instead of the <link>s in the html?
4) Drupal is somewhere in the mix.
5) Mention one of the company core values, of which there are at least 8.
6) Anyone geeky enough to be reading this should apply for a job.
$ lwp-request -e -d www.zappos.com
200 OK
Cache-Control: max-age=2452
Connection: close
Connection: Transfer-Encoding
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:53:38 GMT
Server: nginx/1.1.14
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Client-Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:53:39 GMT
Client-Peer: 203.206.129.48:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Client-Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Link: </favicon.ico>; rel="shortcut icon"; type="image/ico"
Link: </styles/main.p.20120201135153.css>; media="screen"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: </css/print.20120115152845.css>; media="print"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: </styles/home.p.20120201135153.css>; media="screen"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: </>; rel="canonical"
Title: Shoes, Clothing, and More | Zappos.com
X-Cache-Hits: 117
X-Core-Value: 8. Do More With Less
X-Meta-Description: Free shipping BOTH ways on shoes, clothing, and more! 365-day return policy, over 1000 brands, 24/7 friendly customer service. 1-800-927-7671
X-Meta-Keywords: index, zappos, zeta, clothing, shoes
X-Powered-By: Ponies!
X-Recruiting: If you're reading this, maybe you should be working at Zappos instead. Check out jobs.zappos.com
X-UUID: 970dff52-4df6-11e1-a3ab-001a645b7cf4
X-Varnish: 1001890813 1001890584
X-Varnish-Host: varnish04.zappos.net
X-Varnish-ID: drupal
X-Varnish-TTL: 60m
That's 1.3K of overhead per request. I call that doing Less with More. Recruiting in HTTP headers may seem like a clever gimmick to some, but I doubt it could possibly warrant the aggregate degradation of performance. If that's what they call doing "More with Less", my reaction is hardly an urge to work with them.
Yes, I measured the size of the HTTP headers. It's not a subjective measurement. It's not 1322 bytes; it's 1275 bytes. 1322 looks like you forgot to remove the indentation that was added above for code formatting. 1275 bytes == 1.3K.
Where do you get 1275? In any case, you can't consider all of this waste. Some of it is necessary (the connection headers, content-type, some of it is a performance improvement for a subset of clients (the link headers, etc.) and a small percent is waste (X-Recruiting etc.)
I measured the headers in ajtaylor's above post. Zappos delivers different headers each time, and currently they're only giving me 599 bytes, including zero Link headers.
I agree of course that you can't consider all of it a waste. My point was just that their HTTP overhead is exceptionally large, and their superfluous headers adversely affect all of their users despite the fact that almost none of their users will ever read them.
The fact that their X-Core-Value in ajtaylor's example was "8. Do More With Less" makes them seem clueless about the real impact of HTTP overhead.
1) They're using nginx (which is powered by Ponies!) 2) The site is fronted by varnish with a ttl of 1 hour, of which there appear to be at least 4 varnish servers. 3) Links to the various CSS files. Do browsers actually use these headers instead of the <link>s in the html? 4) Drupal is somewhere in the mix. 5) Mention one of the company core values, of which there are at least 8. 6) Anyone geeky enough to be reading this should apply for a job.