Creating scalable web sites that can handle many simultaneous requests and still provide fast experience for each user is hard. Historically, the industry was not differentiating Scalability and Performance, but with emergence of front-end engineering, new field of Web Performance Optimization was born and it became critical to approach them separately. Sergey Chernyshev will compare these two directions of web engineering and describe the differences between them, he will also cover current performance trends and describe different approaches to take in order to measure and analyze Web Performance in comparison to traditional methods that are successfully used to test scalability of web systems.

1. Size & Speed
Scalability vs. Performance
NY Web Performance Meetup
March 27, 2013

2. About
• Doing web dev and
operations since 1996
• Tech Director, Web Ops
and Dev @ truTV/Turner
• Creator of ShowSlow
• Organizer at NY WebPerf
• Board member of WPO
Foundation

3. Why Do We Scale?

4. Available Resources
CPU Memory
Disk Network

5. CPU & Memory
• Classical scale problem
• Scale up (Moor's law)
• Scale out (cloud)

6. Storage
• More available
• Speed and reliability
• Slower then in the past / SSD

7. Network ???
• Easy to scale for static assets
• Trouble if you hit dynamic

8. User Experience

9. How Page Loads
~8 sec above the fold
~0.5 sec for first request
only 6.25% on back end
12sec, 157 req, ~1Mb
http://bit.ly/pageload-video
http://bit.ly/pageload-filmstrip

10. Our Tools

11. Load Testing
apply load,
measure backend
performance degradation

12. "Synthetic" testing
time ALL components of page load
HAR

13. Real User Measurement
measure key performance metrics for REAL users
Boomerang.js

14. Speed, is it important?
RUM data. Aaron Kulick, Cliff Crocker @ Wallmart Labs

15. Speed, it is important!
RUM data. Aaron Kulick, Cliff Crocker @ Wallmart Labs

16. Speed it up
for one user!

17. New York
Web Performance
Meetup
Sergey Chernyshev
@sergeyche
@perfplanet