site speed

How to double the speed of your web applications [VIDEO]

5 Dec 2012

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If you’ve been following this site for any period of time, you probably don’t need to watch this video. But if you’ve been looking for a tool to explain the core tenets of performance optimization — why pages are slow, the impact of slowdowns on your bottom line, and the current solution landscape — to newcomers, this video will help you do that.

It’s a webinar I participated in last week, hosted by our partners at Ecetera, and intended to give their customers a concise overview of key performance issues, challenges, solutions, and results. It’s about 40 minutes long, including some good audience questions at the end.

As always, if you have any questions about any of the material covered here, let me know.

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We’re teaming up with Amazon Web Services to bring advanced FEO to CloudFront customers

26 Nov 2012

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There’s a great quote from Geoffrey Smalling, CTO at Wine.com, in this Strangeloop case study:

Anyone who tells you there is [a single magic bullet] does not have a deep understanding of the myriad issues that affect performance. Performance tuning requires a multi-tiered approach.

To get the best acceleration results, most of our customers use a combination of front-end optimization (FEO), content delivery network (CDN), application delivery controller (ADC), and in-house engineering. But this many acronyms can come with a steep price tag. While this is a great approach if your company has deep pockets or the in-house know-how to structure these solutions, let me paraphrase an old ad: “For everyone else, there’s Amazon CloudFront and Strangeloop.”

This is my roundabout way of announcing our latest partnership, this time with Amazon Web Services. Effective immediately, we’re teaming up to offer Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer service to CloudFront customers.

CDN + FEO: Two great tastes (etc.)

The benefits of combining content delivery with FEO aren’t news if you’ve been reading my blog for a while. To sum it up, CloudFront addresses the performance middle mile by bringing resources closer to users — shortening server round trips and, as a result, making pages load faster. Strangeloop’s technology tackles performance at the front end, analyzing and optimizing every page of a site, without touching code, so that it renders more efficiently in the browser.

As the table below (which uses data from this case study) shows, this combined solution has a huge impact on page metrics, from number of requests to payload to start render and load times. The bottom line: a combined CDN/FEO solution can make pages up to four times faster.

Q: Who wins? A: Small- to mid-sized companies

As a pay-as-you-go service, CloudFront brings an affordable content delivery service to smaller companies. In the same way, we can now bring advanced FEO — which has formerly only been available to companies with those aforementioned deep pockets — to smaller companies, as well as to companies for whom FEO is murky new territory.

Amazon Web Services senior manager Alex Dunlap has written a really great post on the AWS blog that talks about our partnership and explains how to configure Amazon CloudFront to work with Site Optimizer. I urge you to check it out if you want more insight into how our services complement each other.

If you have any questions about how these two solutions work together or their net benefit, let me know. In the meantime, expect an Amazon sales rep and a Strangeloop rep to show up at your door and make a compelling case for why you can get better performance for a fraction of the cost you are currently paying your existing provider. Let the games begin. :)

MORE: Find out how to get started with CloudFront and Strangeloop.

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The average web page has grown 20% in just six months

15 Nov 2012

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The HTTPArchive celebrates its second birthday this month, and it seems fitting to check in and take a quick snapshot of a typical web page. Not surprisingly, pages are bigger. But surprisingly, pages are even bigger than I expected.

Here you can see the growth in average page size over just two years:

Web page growth: November 2010 to November 2012

When I checked last spring, the average page came in at 1042 KB, just over 1 MB. In other words, a typical web page carries a payload that’s 20% bigger than it was just six months ago.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed an interesting trend over the past few years. At this time of year, pages suffer “holiday bloat” as site owners try to stuff in more images, Flash, and rich media, not to mention a fresh crop of third-party scripts for things like ads, analytics, and trackers. Not unlike us Westerners, pages get fatter throughout November and December, and then, interestingly, trim down a bit when they go on a crash diet in January. At the risk of pushing this analogy over the edge, I’ll add that, like all crash diets, the effects don’t last. Before long, pages start puffing up again.

Pages could hit 2 MB in early 2014

When I wrote about page bloat for GigaOM last May, I projected that, at the then-current rate of growth, the average page would hit 2 MB in 2015. Based on this new finding, we need to upgrade that prediction to early 2014:

Projected web page growth: November 2012 to May 2014

Page bloat in and of itself isn’t news. Page bloat of this magnitude is. This has obvious ramifications for desktop users, but mobile users will be much harder hit.

For more insight into the current state of web pages, I recommend you check out Andrew King’s recent post Average Number of Web Page Objects Breaks 100, as well as Catchpoint’s Holiday Shopping 2012 State of Web Performance.

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What we learned from testing the mobile load times of 200 top retail sites over 3G and LTE

3 Oct 2012

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Earlier today, I had an exciting opportunity to present some of the findings of Strangeloop’s newest study, the 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance at Velocity EU. I’ll be posting those slides shortly, but first want to take a moment to talk about this study and why we’re so excited about it.

Why test over cellular networks?

Last spring, we were sitting in the office talking about mobile performance measurement and why it’s so hard to get reliable real-world numbers, especially over cellular networks. This seemed like a glaring knowledge gap, but it’s an understandable gap given the massive variability in network performance. Last year, I did an informal latency survey and found that latency can fluctuate wildly, even in the same location at the same time.

3G latency

Methodology: How to DIY your own RUM tests for mobile

So we set out to develop a reliable methodology for measuring mobile performance over cellular networks, which takes this variability into account. We also wanted to create a methodology that anyone could recreate fairly easily.

Here’s how we did it:

  • We focused on 200 leading retail sites, as ranked by Alexa.com.
  • We selected six testing devices: iPhone 4, iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, iPad 2, and Samsung Galaxy tablet.
  • iPhone 4, Galaxy S, iPad 2 and Galaxy tablet were tested over 3G.
  • iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 were tested over LTE.
  • We tested each site’s home page 30 times per device, using the device’s native browser. By testing this many times and capturing the median result, we hoped to take into account latency variability.
  • For all tests, the devices were positioned in the same location, in an attempt to mitigate the latency impact caused by location changes.
  • For all tests, wifi was turned off, devices and radios were at full power, and screens were not allowed to lock during testing.
  • The tests in this study were conducted using a RUM beacon inserted into the page that captured the onload time. The cache and cookies were cleared automatically between each test.

The results

As I shared at Velocity, the results were a mix of the predictable and the surprising:

Predictable: Pages are slow over 3G.

It’s not that shocking to learn that the median pages took 11 or more seconds to load over 3G.

Surprising: A significant number of pages took 20+ seconds to load.

While we expected pages to be slow, we didn’t expect that 9% of the pages we tested took more than 20 seconds to load on the iPhone.

Predictable: LTE was faster than 3G.

No explanation needed here.

Surprising: LTE was only 27% faster than 3G.

I’ve heard claims that LTE is, on average, ten times faster than 3G. Our results suggest that LTE performance gains might be more unpredictable than this.

Predictable: Pages loaded 22% faster on the iPad than on the Galaxy tablet.

iPad fans might scoff that we even bothered to test this.

Surprising: The Galaxy S3 phone loaded pages 9% faster than the iPhone 5.

It’ll be interesting to hear what iPhone fans make of this. (Full disclosure: I have an iPhone 5 and have to admit I was kind of affronted to see these results.)

Check out our infographics of the report’s highlights, below, and I encourage you to read the findings for yourself. If you have any questions about our findings or approach, don’t hesitate to ask.

Load times of 200 leading retail sites on mobile devices over 3G and LTE networks

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The 33 best web performance links of Q2 2012

31 Jul 2012

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For some reason, I thought that the past few months had been kind of quiet on the research front, so when I started this post, I thought it would be one of my shortest roundups yet. I was pleasantly surprised to watch it grow to become one of the longest!

There are some great case studies here, of both large and small sites, which I love to see. There’s also some truly excellent debate about responsive design and the mobile web, sparked by a post from Jakob Nielsen last spring, as well as some good stuff about the browser wars and third-party content. So enough with the intro. Let’s get into it.

Case studies

Optimizing Retr-O-Mat’s Web Performance

A casual performance optimizer details her efforts to get Retr-O-Mat’s average load times under 2 seconds. Good information for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of front-end optimization (FEO).

Web performance can be beautiful too

After performing poorly in a 2011 web performance comparison of leading retailers, Crate and Barrel made WPO a priority moving forward. This blog post from Catchpoint shows just how “beautiful” their performance has been in 2012.

How the Post is improving site performance

Responding to a flood of user frustrations with their website, the IT team at the Washington Post rolled out a number of performance upgrades to their site over the past year. Find out what they did to improve their page speed by 32.4%.

Tips and how-tos

Building a faster web: Tools, tips, and lessons

If “faster connectivity and more bandwidth won’t save us,” then what will? Google’s Ilya Grigorik shares his insight on making the web faster in this in-depth slide deck, and he draws some very interesting conclusions.

How to Make Progress Bars Feel Faster to Users

The human perception of time is anything but linear, and with just minor visual tricks, it gets even more skewed. After reading this post, you may never trust a progress bar again. :)

The 3 white lies behind Instagram’s lightning speed

More cool perceptual tricks. The “secret sauce” behind Instagram’s stellar user experience is rooted in a combination of coding tricks aimed at giving users a feeling of constant responsiveness. Find out how their site “always pretends to work.”

Mobile

The web only works thanks to reload (and why the mobile web fails)

As Mike Belshe points out, web page resources routinely fail, but thanks to the ever-handy reload/refresh button, we can often solve these problems ourselves. With mobile browsing, however, the rules are different. Find out what this means for the future of HTML 5.

Web first for mobile

Performance evangelist Steve Souders focuses his performance research strictly on the mobile web – not on native apps. Why? He’s got more than a few good reasons.

A taste test of mobile website development

A solid webcast on the complex world of mobile development, touching on topics including Responsive Web Design (RWD), server-side device detection, and HTML5 performance on mobile.

Jakob Nielsen on mobile sites vs. full sites

Jakob Nielsen believes that mobile and full sites should be entirely different entities. Summarizing his argument, he states that “good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.”

Is Nielsen wrong on mobile? Arguments abound

From Net magazine: Jakob Nielsen’s assertion that “good mobile user experience requires a different design” is being challenged by a noted mobile expert, who argues that rather than stripping down for mobile, companies should be doing more.

Why we shouldn’t make separate mobile websites

More counterpoint to Nielsen’s post. Smashing Magazine’s Bruce Lawson argues that mobile redirection is unreliable, and excluding features for mobile browsers “perpetuates the digital divide.”

Responsive web design: Missing the point

Still more Nielsen backlash: Brad Frost states that, though mobile browsers are getting better at rendering full websites, creating adaptive sites for mobile users is essential to improving the user experience.

HTML5 features increase mobile usage by 28%

Interesting piece explaining how static pages needing an upgrade can vastly improve mobile user engagement through the addition of HTML5. The new release features interactive galleries, overlays, and expandable/collapsible boxes, driving up pageviews and decreasing bounce rates.

Tools

More ways to measure web performance with User Timings

Google Analytics has expanded its collection of Site Speed reports with a new feature called User Timings. The feature enables tracking of specific load times for discrete hits, images, and other user interactions.

New mod_spdy release supports Apache servers

More from Google. The latest version of mod_spdy – an Apache module that adds SPDY server support – is intended to fix bugs found in the original release.

“Speed Index” introduced as new performance metric

The Speed Index metric has been added to WebPagetest, helping measure the speed at which page contents are visually populated. The tool is especially useful for comparing page experience before and after optimization.

Browsers

Browser Speed Tests: Chrome 19, Firefox 13, Internet Explorer 9, and Opera 12

Lifehacker conducts it’s semi-regular browser speed tests, pitting the four titans of desktop browsing against each other in races for startup speed, tab loading times, and other performance indicators.

Which Browsers are the Fastest?

An interesting companion read to the Lifehacker piece, New Relic’s “Speed Wars” study shows that, while IE 9 speeds past other browsers on Windows, Chrome 13 on Mac was overall the fastest experience. In mobile speed tests, the fastest experience was delivered by Blackberry Opera Mini at 2.6 seconds, twice as fast as Safari 5.1 on iPad.

How the Chrome Predictor hides latency from users

Ilya Grigorik demonstrates how Google Chrome hides latency from users. Interesting stuff here.

Internet Explorer market share surges, as IE 9 wins hearts and minds

From Ars Tecnica: “The browser wars are back on in earnest. For the second time in three months, Internet Explorer made large gains, picking up almost 1 point of market share. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all lost out, as Internet Explorer 9 won over new users.”

CDNs

A one-size-fits-all CDN solution isn’t always best

Server configurations come in all shapes and sizes, which means a one-size-fits-all CDN is seldom effective. Find out which Level 3 customer was the beneficiary of a custom CDN solution and how it worked out.

Third-party content

10 Golden Rules for 3rd Party Providers

Murphy’s Law reigned supreme throughout June, with a flood of large-scale outages taking down some of the world’s most popular websites. Given the inevitability of online failures, third-party providers must be prepared to deal with the worst. The folks at Catchpoint outline the 10 Golden Rules by which all third-party providers should live by.

The vendor who flunked the web performance test

Are third-party vendors ignorant to the consequences of slow web performance? According to Catchpoint they are, as they detail a story of one such vendor who was completely unaware of the performance impact of their product.

Average UK website has 14 trackers per page

Interesting findings from TRUSTe: Despite the prevalence of privacy policies, over two-thirds of trackers on UK websites originate from third-party companies, and almost half embed themselves permanently.

Google releases +1 button preview – loads 20% faster

Google announced that they’ve improved performance of the +1 button and Google+ badge. By reducing the size of the js/plusone.js loader and making the code smarter, page elements now load 20% faster.

Third-party JavaScript should be loaded asynchronously

Old news to some, but still worth mentioning: Third-party JavaScript should be loaded asynchronously, as it helps avoid slowdowns and can speed up page loads.

Third-party front-end performance, Act 1

Application provider Bazaarvoice is delving into the realm of front-end performance, and provides an interesting third-party perspective.

Opinions and analysis

Performance Nightmare: Nasdaq & the Facebook IPO

When Facebook began trading on May 18, 2012, a series of performance failures on Nasdaq.com caused a huge headache for the company. This article from Intechnica asks how much these badly timed hiccups cost investors.

More, better, faster: Steve Souders on WPO

Steve Souders kicked off O’Reilly’s Velocity video podcast series with an in-depth discussion of the state of web performance optimization. Key topics included measuring slowness, performance monitoring tools, and whether mobile disrupts performance.

Other research

How complex systems fail

As a complex and interdependent system, the web is prone to catastrophe at the highest levels. In this fascinating paper on resilience engineering, presented at Velocity 2012, Dr. Richard Cook outlines the reasons why all complex systems are intrinsically hazardous, why disaster is always just around the corner, and how failure-free operations still require experience with failure.

The growing epidemic of page bloat

I don’t usually pimp my own writing here, but this information is too important not to share. I wrote a piece for GigaOM showing that the average page size is now over 1MB, according to the HTTP Archive. At current growth rates, the average page could hit 2MB by 2015, which is a really big deal, especially for mobile users.

How fast are websites around the world?

Some fascinating findings here. Google’s Site Speed Reports provides detailed latency data for page load times by separating data according to device, location, and industry.

These links were all sourced from Strangeloop’s Web Performance Hub, which contains hundreds (and by now, possibly even thousands) of industry-wide links, organized by topic, source, research type, and industry. It’s a pretty good resource, if I do say so. If you have any new links to recommend, let me know.

http://t.co/EHbRdT6r
10 Golden Rules for 3rd Party Providers [article]
Catchpoint – June 26, 2012
Summary: Murphy’s Law reigned supreme throughout June, with a flood of large-scale outages taking down some of the world’s most popular websites. Given the inevitability of online failures, third-party providers must be prepared to deal with the worst. Find out the 10 Golden Rules by which all third-party providers should operate by.
http://t.co/LGYUpGn1
End-to-end optimization: Taking content delivery to the next level [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 27, 2012
Summary: Strangeloop Networks is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest product, Network Accelerator. Learn all about how this product works, what it does – and most importantly – why it’s a major step forward for content delivery networks.
http://t.co/T4z69s7k
How complex systems fail [research paper]
CTALab.org – June 26, 2012
Summary: As a complex and interdependent system, the web is prone to failure and catastrophe at the highest levels. In this fascinating paper on resilience engineering, Dr. Richard Cook outlines the reasons why all complex systems are intrinsically hazardous, why catastrophe is always just around the corner, and how failure-free operations require experience with failure.
http://bit.ly/LzGPqN
Mobile optimization starts with mindset: Hooman Beheshti interviewed at Velocity 2012
O’Reilly Media – June 25, 2012
Summary: Where are we in the mobile optimization life-cycle? What mindset should site owners adopt when boosting mobile performance? Are performance measurements improving? In this video, Strangeloop Technology VP Hooman Beheshti offers his unique insight on the current state of mobile.
http://t.co/Vnced8tq
The 90-Minute Mobile Optimization Life Cycle [slides]
Strangeloop Networks – June 25, 2012
Summary: Strangeloop Technology VP Hooman Beheshti wowed attendees at this year’s Velocity Conference with a presentation on the mobile optimization life cycle. For those who missed it, be sure to check to check out these fascinating slides.
http://bit.ly/Nu1gCi
Ghosts of Velocities Past: 9 presentations that are still relevant today [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 20, 2012
Summary: Velocity’s short (yet incredibly important) history is filled with memorable moments, and these 9 presentations from past conferences remain relevant today. Perhaps not trendsetting anymore, but certainly trend affirming, which may just be better.
http://bit.ly/MFuxMR
My recent post on SEOMoz: 13 Questions (and Answers) About Google, Site Speed, and SEO [article]
SEOmoz – June 18, 2012
Summary: In this article, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby breaks down how site speed and performance metrics affect Google page ranks. For anyone who has ever wondered how Google manages to make performance metrics affect SEO, this article is a must-read.
http://mz.cm/M24fGc
Introducing: New Browser Tax feature for our ecommerce customers [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 14, 2012
Summary: Ever wish you could arbitrarily tax your customer base for failing to stay current, with zero repercussions? With the new Strangeloop Browser tax, your wish is now a reality!
http://bit.ly/NC5Q65
Optimizing Retr-O-Mat’s Web Performance [blog post]
Finding Marbles – June 9, 2012
Summary: For the “WPO guy’s wife,” average load times just aren’t good enough. In this post, a blogger and casual performance optimizer details her efforts to get Retr-O-Mat’s average load times under 2 seconds. Great information for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of WPO.
http://t.co/k0lXkniG
Browser Speed Tests: Chrome 19, Firefox 13, Internet Explorer 9, and Opera 12 [article]
Lifehacker – June 12, 2012
Summary: It’s a battle of startup times, tab loading times and other KPIs between the four titans of Windows browsing. Lifehacker’s speed tests are always entertaining for what they’re not afraid to say, and this article is no exception.
http://bit.ly/Nb2ibS
Marrying CDNs with front-end optimization for maximum acceleration [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 12, 2012
Summary: Front-end optimization (FEO) has been weaving its way further into content delivery networks (CDNs) over the past two years, and the dynamic between these two technologies continues to evolve. In this video presentation, Strangeloop’s Joshua Bixby breaks down the benefits of combining these performance solutions.
http://bit.ly/L3aatz
How the Chrome Predictor hides latency from users [article]
Igvita.com – June 4, 2012
Summary: Google Chrome features countless tools for supercharging load times, but when those aren’t enough, the browser can hide latency from users. Find out how!
http://bit.ly/Nw6ZMh
Building a faster web: tools, tips, and lessons [slides]
Igvita.com – June 3, 2012
Summary: If “faster connectivity and more bandwidth won’t save us,” then what will? Google’s Ilya Grigorik shares his insight on making the web faster in this in-depth slide deck, and draws some very interesting conclusions.
http://bit.ly/L0eERH
The “performance poverty line”: What is it and why does it matter? [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June , 2012
Summary: The “performance poverty line” is the point at which business metrics have sunk so low, load times cease to matter. But how is this line measured? Does it differ between industries? And most importantly: is there hope?
http://bit.ly/NJAqs2
A one-size-fits-all CDN solution isn’t always best [article]
Level 3 – June , 2012
Summary: Server configurations come in all shapes and sizes, which means a one-size-fits-all CDN is seldom effective. Find out which Level 3 customer was the beneficiary of a custom CDN solution.
http://bit.ly/M9P5xt
Why the Facebook outage is (yet another) wakeup call for site owners [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June , 2012
Summary: The hazards of running third-party scripts are well documented, but the May 31st Facebook outage was another stern reminder. In this post, Strangeloop’s Joshua Bixby discusses all things third-party, including rogue content and common performance pitfalls caused by third-party content.
http://bit.ly/JQj7GX
The web only works thanks to reload (and why the mobile web fails) [article]
Belshe.com – June , 2012
Summary: Web page resources routinely fail, but thanks to the ever-handy reload/refresh button, we can often solve these problems ourselves. With mobile browsing, however, the rules are different. Find out what this means for the future of HTML 5.
http://bit.ly/NAAQ3O
How to Make Progress Bars Feel Faster to Users
UXMovement – June , 2012
Summary: The human perception of time is anything but linear, and with just minor visual tricks, it gets even more skewed. After reading this post, you’ll never trust a progress bar again!
http://bit.ly/NcsVfg
Does the average web user waste two days a year waiting for pages to load? [blog post]
Strangeloop Networks – June , 2012
Summary: It may not be true, but in web performance, perception is reality. Web users in the UK are less than pleased about their online experience, but just how cranky are they?
http://bit.ly/LSFIlv

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