While I don’t think Patrick Killelea‘s Top Ten Web Performance Tuning Tips is as bad as John Lim thinks they are, but I must say, that I do strongly disagree with Patrick’s #2 suggestion of not using style sheets. Despite the “separate download” (that’s what HTTP 1.1 is for right?), on average a styled page will save more than it’s weight in font tags. If you’re able to get away with ignoring ns4 rendering, a typical (X)HTML strict/CSS2 page will be one half to one third the size of a similarly laid out tabled page. Add in the spacer images and accompanying “separate downloads” and multiply by the fact that the style sheet will be cached and used across the entire site. If you can get away with it, CSS beats HTML layout hands down. Also, arguing that JS is source of pop-up advertising is like saying that GIF files are a source of blinking. It’s only a problem if you use it that way and isn’t some inherrent problem. Using JS code does not randomly cause pop-ups.
#5 I’d sorta agree with (although I would say that in most cases using CORBA or EJB won’t improve a programmer’s code-writing productivity) with the huge caveat that using CGI would probably be as slow or slower than a J2EE app server, and at least 1-2 magnitude slower than an embedded module like mod_perl, php, or even asp (although god help you if you’re going to run IIS). Never use CGI. CGI bad. Also, as is implied in #8, heavy middleware with powerful caching (for example, Vignette) can beat out less optimally coded but lighter-weight methods.
One thing that isn’t really a real tip, but is fun is that there’s a free analysis tool on Patricks’ website. According to his analyzer, [my] site kicks ass. No tuning needed. Slowest part was server silence, but it was fast enough.