Twitter Cuts Load Time By 80% & Gets Rid Of Hashbangs In URLs

While Twitter’s performance is leaps and bounds above their previous “fail whale” days, it will only get faster.  In a blog post yesterday, the Twitter engineering team announced that they have reviewed their entire technology stack in a mission to optimize the site’s speed.

With the “New Twitter” the UI rendering occurred via JavaScript on users’ browsers on both web and mobile interfaces.  With recent changes, the rendering has been moved back to the server.  This means that initial load times have been dropped to 1/5th of what they were, or an 80% drop.

One item that you will see noticeably absent moving forward is the hashbang (#!).  The hashbang is being phased out due to limitations and bloat.  So instead of seeing URLs like:

http://twitter.com/#!/Marketingland/status/207751021970198530

The address will now look like:

http://twitter.com/Marketingland/status/207751021970198530

Additional efforts to minifying Javascript  usage and reducing the time to tweet are also underway and rolling out across the site.  It should also be noted that all of these changes will not affect the UI, rather make it speedier.

For more information see the official post on the Twitter engineers blog.