High Speed Web Sites At Scale

High Speed Web Sites At Scale
Buddy Brewer

About Buddy
I build web performance monitoring products and help companies make their sites faster
From San Francisco Bay Area, California
Co-Founder Log-Normal, Inc.
http://lognormal.com
@bbrewer

Does speed matter?
How fast is my site?
What can I do about it?

In 2006, the average online shopper expected a web page to load in 4 seconds. Today, that same shopper expects your page to load in 2 seconds or less. (Forrester Consulting)
A 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. (Aberdeen Group)
One e-commerce company found that every 100ms delay cost them 1% of sales. (Amazon.com)

Does speed matter?

Synthetic monitoring

Synthetic: Benefits
Object-level response times
Visibility into third-party performance
Visibility into HTTP headers (caching, compression, etc)
Can test parts of your site that aren’t frequented by users
Can get back-end performance for older browsers

Synthetic: Drawbacks
Not representative of real users
Limited coverage of popular browsers
Limited insight into mobile devices and connections
Sometimes limited geographic coverage
Must know in advance what parts of your site you want to analyze
Results can be “gamed” by clever third party vendors

Real User Monitoring
http://www.flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/97181432/

Real User Monitoring: Benefits
Represents the “truth” – by measuring real visitors to your site
You automatically measure the parts of your site that matter to users
Total browser coverage (as long as they support Javascript)
Works equally well on today’s mobile and desktop web browsers
Difficult for third party vendors to game
Can measure performance in the context of business goals (conversions, etc)

Navigation Timing
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webperf/raw-file/tip/specs/NavigationTiming/Overview.html

Real User Monitoring: Drawbacks
No object-level response times (yet)
You have to add code to your site
User privacy concerns must be navigated
No back-end performance data for legacy browsers

Resources
Free / open source monitoring tools
Synthetic: WebPageTest (http://www.webpagetest.org)
Real user: boomerang.js (http://github.com/yahoo/boomerang)
Plenty of commercial options too

Does speed matter?

Use the browser cache
HTTP 1.0 – Expires:
HTTP 1.1 - Cache-Control: max-age
Watch out for Etags!
Source: http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#max-age

Compress, shed weight, limit requests
http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#onLoad

Compress, shed weight, limit requests
Make sure Gzip is turned on!
Consider explicitly testing for Gzip support
Google found 15% of browsers that support Gzip don’t say so
Optimize images (JPEG metadata, colors/channels, smush.it)
CSS sprites, JS minify, combine stylesheets and JS files where possible
http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#onLoad

Watch out for third parties
http://httparchive.org/trends.php#numDomains

Consider using a content optimizer

Summary
Make end user performance a priority
Measure your site constantly
Treat performance like a feature

Большоеспасибо
http://lognormal.com
@bbrewer

High Speed Web Sites At Scale

by Buddy Brewer on Oct 03, 2011

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