We went through Google Code and did a lot of work to get it running faster.

The team used a lot of the principles from Steve Souders book: High Performance Web Sites and ended up with a nice gain:

According to our latency measurement stats, the user-perceived latency on Google Code dropped quite a bit, anywhere between 30% and 70% depending on the page. This is a huge return for relatively small investments we’ve made along the way, and we hope you’ll find these techniques useful for your own web development as well.

The changes were low hanging fruit that most of the sites could also implement:

• Combined and minimized JavaScript and CSS files used throughout the site
• Implemented CSS sprites for frequently-used images
• Implemented lazy loading of Google AJAX APIs loader module (google.load)