New Year’s Resolutions for Web Performance 2009

New Year’s Resolution #1 I will always monitor my sites from where my end-users are. Performance can vary 5X or more. My users don’t live in my data center, or at least I haven’t seen any.

New Year’s Resolution #2 When moving my applications into the cloud, I will continue monitoring my performance 24/7. IT cloud services will form 25 percent of all incremental global IT spending growth by 2012 according to IDC. I will not exclusively rely on the cloud computing provider to monitor my applications’ performance.

New Year’s Resolution #3 I will benchmark my performance against my competitors and beat them. Relative performance matters!

New Year’s Resolution #4 I will watch the outliers in my performance data. Averages can be misleading. I need to watch the 95th percentiles, slowest hours etc.

New Year’s Resolution #5 I will test my applications’ performance early & often in the application lifecycle. I will download KITE at kite.keynote.com and test my apps globally for free. (and tell my coworkers that KITE is available and free for them as well!)