Web Performance Watch

Did You Fall When Facebook Stumbled?

Thursday's outage of Facebook was notable for the ripple it created across the Web. Many online businesses were impacted indirectly as a result of failing content integrated into their websites. The nearly ubiquitous "Like" button and Facebook's other social plugins became a drag on the performance and availability of some websites. We saw notable failures across media, travel and retail sites. Yet, other some appeared to have avoided significant impact.

The websites of CNN, USA Today and Expedia--members of the Keynote Business 40 Index--demonstrate how different approaches to integrating the Facebook social plugin can be the difference between disaster and only a minor setback when 3rd party content fails.

Here are graphs of their performance and availability during the outage (along with Facebook's for reference):

Notice USA Today's performance (the blue line). Their home page continued to happily build despite the lack of content availability from Facebook.

Incidents like this are good reminders of the importance of using page construction best practices that accomodate third party content failures. If you feature ads, widgets or plugins on your site, do they represent a potential single point of failure if the service becomes unavailable?

Even if you take care with integrating third party content into your pages, it's important to continuously monitor each source indepently if your site changes frequently. Keynote helps companies uniquely monitor 3rd party content such as ads, social widgets and plugins so you can quickly take action to mitigate performance issues and focus business improvement with actionable data.

So how did your site perform Thursday evening?

Open API Access to the Keynote Business 40 Index Data

Here is a cool tip for a Friday afternoon: anyone can access the Keynote Business 40 Index using our new API. This index provides the average performance and availability of 40 top websites.

Of course the primary users of our RESTful API are customers who want to access their own measurement data. However, a neat easter egg is that anyone who makes a graph data API request but doesn't state which Keynote measurement slot(s) they want, will get back the Keynote Business 40 data. To do this you just need a free KITE log-in or a MyKeynote log-in if you are a customer.

Here's a step by step 'how to' that also has the nice side benefit of teaching you how to use the API in a rudimentary way.

Step 1: Generate a free KITE log-in

All this step requires is an email address, I suspect you might have one of these if you are reading this. Just go here and sign-up for KITE log-in. If you already use our free KITE tool or are a MyKeynote user then you'll have already completed this step.

Step 2: Generate an API key

Go to api.keynote.com and input your shiny new login where prompted. Now navigate over to the 'Key Management' tab to generate an API key as shown below. Save the results somewhere handy, like your clipboard.

Step 3: Make a request

To save time and effort I've provided a few sample API requests that you can just plug your key from Step 2 into. Note that you can enter these into a browser, just as if you were visiting a website.

However, you may still want to explore the API documentation yourself as the 'getgraphdata' command offers a multitude of optional parameters that work with the KB40 index, for example averaging data by city. With that query you could see how this group of sites performs differently around the world! Just keep in mind some options, like 'scatter', won't return anything since the index doesn't have that level of detail right now. Also getgraphdata is the only command that defaults to the index right now.

Two examples:

https://api.keynote.com/keynote/api/getgraphdata?api_key=[your key here]&graphtype=time&format=json

https://api.keynote.com/keynote/api/getgraphdata?api_key=[your key here]&graphtype=city&format=json

Step 4: Build an application

Of course your imagination, motivation, and capabilities are the only limits here. I'm hoping that anyone who builds an application or mashup with this data will let us know. Go ahead and drop a post over at the forums if you build an app or have a question about doing this.

 

Enjoy!

Another Win for Keynote Customers

When Keynote introduced Cloud Application Perspective last year, we believed that it addressed a critical gap in the way companies monitored the performance of their Web applications. As “cloud” technologies have emerged, websites have become more a coupling of components from multiple assembly lines, rather than a product manufactured in a dedicated IT application factory. Monitoring the performance of a website in its end-user state—the sum of the many parts—makes sense. But when issues arise, quickly finding their location in the “supply chain” can be a challenge.

What if you could drop something into that “supply chain”, at the key points of potential failure, giving you insight into your Web app’s performance? What if this was so easy to install, a non-IT person could do it in minutes? And what if the cost was just pennies per measurement?

Last week, the SIIA CODiE awards recognized Keynote Cloud Application Perspective for best Cloud Application/Service, along with Google and Scribe Software. They did so because Cloud Application Perspective offers customers a radically new way to monitor their websites and applications. Unlike traditional APM options, Cloud Application Perspective is uber-portable, monkey-simple to implement and really affordable.

Although we’re honored to have won this award, our customers are the real winners. Taking advantage of the cloud can be complex. Monitoring it should be easy. If you’d like to see how easy it can be with Cloud Application Perspective, get a free trial today!

Guidelines for 3-screen Performance Management

Recently, the web performance team at Walmart joined us for a webcast on site performance in a 3-screen world. The emergence of both smartphones and now tablets as primary vehicles for driving online interaction including e-commerce is well documented. What’s still not as well understood are the implications to site design that impact performance across the desktop, smartphone and tablet environments.

While I encourage you to watch the webcast, here are a few launch-pad performance benchmarks and tips to think about for your Web and mobile sites:

1. 3-screen is more than 3-screen
   On the desktop, multiple browsers add some complexity to understanding performance. But the multiple permutations of OS/hardware/versions representing today’s smartphone and tablet environments exacerbate the complexity of the user experience online.
2. You can’t take it with you
   Performance management concepts for one screen do not translate to the others. A study by Yankee Group found that Apple’s website ran nearly 200% faster on desktop than Amazon’s site, but ran 3% slower on tablet.
3. Starting-point benchmarks
   
   
   
4. Minimize, and gracefully enhance
   Develop with the 3G connection in mind first, and add to the experience from there. For smartphone and tablets, consider the following practices:
   

   >> Limit element count to 10 or fewer new HTTP requests/page

   >> Avoid redirects

   >> Reduce the number of DNS lookups/page

   >> Always use HTTP Keep Alive

   >> Audit image content for appropriate resolution, quality settings and compression

5. One size does not fit all!
   Commit to accurately and consistently measure performance and optimize based on where you have issues/latency and within your technical constraints. Your unique situation will impact how you approach improvement, e.g.: front end versus back end, CDN versus network, 3^rd party versus CMS, etc. The benchmarks above are only as good as what is normal for you, your industry and your competitors. Find other benchmarks, and network with your peers.

April Release

Ah, spring! Hard not to love this time of year, especially when it brings new goodies. In the spirit of "new" we're excited to share some great news for Keynote customers!

Yesterday, we made generally available all the innovations hundreds of our customers have been trying out in the MyKeynote 11 live beta over the past two months. We've been sharing a lot of information about what's new in this major release, but if you've missed the low-down, here's a quick summary:

1. User Experience metrics - Keynote Transaction Perspective was the first synthetic monitoring service to use real browsers for measuring Web page performance, and has always captured the total time a Web page takes to download and assemble in the browser: Total User Time. But now, Transaction Perspective measurements using our new IE 9 agents also capture Browser Events using the W3C Navigation Timing API, plus 3 new User Experience metrics: Time to First Paint, Time to Full Screen and Time to Interactive Page.
2. Web Privacy Tracking - You might be wondering, what does privacy has to do with Keynote? The fact of the matter is that just as performance needs regular monitoring from the end user perspective, privacy does too. Both are a part of the online experience Keynote helps companies continuously improve. And if your website serves advertising, Keynote can now help you monitor your website's privacy exposure around the clock, and build trust with visitors. Keynote Web Privacy Tracking is a completely new product that shows the third party ad networks who are tracking your site visitors, how they came to your site and whether they are complying with your corporate privacy policy.
3. New look, fresh feel - Whether its real-time dashboards are running like heads-up displays in a NOC, or it's opened from an alert, the MyKeynote monitoring portal is the go-to resource for Web Ops teams everywhere. We've given MyKeynote a new design that makes monitoring easier and more efficient than ever. Although many improvements are easy to spot, most just make it “feel” better.

You can see all this new functionality in action by watching this 10-minute video. Check it out!

KITE 5: Introducing New User Experience Metrics

KITE has always provided a rich set of information about the network performance of web sites and applications. Now KITE 5 gives you further insight into web performance by reporting a class of User Experience metrics based on the W3C Navigation Timing specification. These new metrics reflect the user experience of your web site or application by reporting what is happening in Internet Explorer 9 during script playback.

When you play back Transaction Perspective (TxP) scripts in IE9, KITE automatically captures key browser events that allow you to answer questions about users’ experience of your web site or application, such as:

• When does a user actually see something other than a blank browser window?
• When can a user click, swipe or scroll on a page?
• How fast is the page for real users?

You can find these metrics reported as “Browser Events” in the Transaction Performance Details tab:

Time to Full Screen

Time to Full Screen is a special user experience metric that indicates when a page has loaded to a specified point. For example, this could be the time it takes to display a “full screen” of the page until the user has to scroll to see more content, sometimes known as “above the fold”. KITE let's you define this by identifying a specific page element, and measuring the elapsed time up to when that object starts downloading.

The Time to Full Screen is reported in milliseconds as a page level component on the Transaction Performance Summary when the script is run.

Read the full release notes for more detail on these, and all of KITE 5's new features.

 

Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

 

This past weekend, Apple sold a record 3 million new iPad 3 tablets. That’s pretty phenomenal. Yet, it came on the back of a pretty bad outage only 10 days before.

On March 7, Apple announced the new iPad 3. For effectively the entire day, the Apple Store was unavailable. That meant no one could check out the new iPad, nor purchase iPhones, MacBooks or anything else.  

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

We’ve written previously about the concept of tenacity. A website visitor’s tolerance for errors, or delays, is a major factor when balancing the cost and benefit of building capacity and engineering performance into Web applications. While Apple’s fanatic customer base is an extreme, it illustrates the point that there’s a continuum of performance expectations for users.

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Last month, we announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.

As we’ve discussed here previously, IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their sites’ performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.

Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways:

• Time to First Paint – This new metric tells you when a user begins to see your site render in the browser.
• Time to Interactive Page – Tells you when the Document Object Model (DOM) begins to process user events for the document.
• Total User Experience Time – With User Experience Time, you know how long a page (or series of pages) took to render and become usable for a real user.  It is the ultimate measure of a page’s speed, factoring not only the time it took for data to be downloaded, but also rendered and made interactive.

These key moments are just a handful of the browser events we capture. If you’re a performance expert, you’ll appreciate that we measure all the Browser Navigation Timing events and can graph them individually over time (multiple measurements), as well as display them in a timeline view for an individual measurement.

KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) lets you to test for free your site’s performance from 5 cities on the Keynote Global Network, on demand. But if you’d like to test drive User Experience monitoring, click the “24x7 Monitoring” button in KITE.

Once you’ve activated your trial, click the “Try Beta Version” link in MyKeynote. There, you’ll be able view User Experience metrics for everything monitored during your trial.

Soon, you’ll be able to see these new browser event metrics from your desktop in KITE, as well. Your copy of KITE should automatically update itself to version 5, or you can manually check for the new version. 

Let us know what you think of these new features!

Making IT Matter

Yesterday, I read an article reporting about a company's potential plans to upgrade one of its key business applications. The article featured perspectives from the application's end users, management and of course, the IT organization that developed and now supports it. The dynamic at issue was the app's lack of compatibility across browsers.

When asked about the likelihood of a change, the company's IT director responded with the following:

"[My organization has] been shying away from upgrading a major version of [biz app] because every time we’ve done it, it’s been tremendously difficult." (emphasis added)

Super. And once again, we have another reason why 
"IT doesn't matter."

While the end users could not understand why the application wouldn't run reliably on Safari and Chrome in this case, IT was not convinced it was necessary to change the app to support them. Of course, cross-browser compatibility is a thorny issue. We've explored the reasons why site owners need to consider multi-browser strategies, and considerations for getting there. In this instance, there may no real viable solution for improving this application's end-user experience with regard to browser support.

But saying that it won't be done because "it’s been tremendously difficult" exemplifies the challenges that IT continues to have with finding relevance in a cloudy, mobile, and increasingly consumerized IT landscape. Today, the end user matters more than ever. IT organizations that recognize this, inculcate a user-first approach into how they manage their portfolio as well as tool choices. They adopt standards that support user oriented approaches. And the good news for IT is that these standards and tools exist.

It's possible that the choice of words of this IT manager in this instance belies other realities. But on the surface, the sentiment provides exactly the motivation that will drive this IT organization's customers and business stakeholders to a competitive SaaS application.

The end-user makes IT matter

Making IT to matter means placing the user at the forefront of the priority matrix, from choices in platform to its ongoing monitoring. Your users are changing... rapidly. When an architecture cannot support the expectations today's user, it will not survive.

 

Up on the Roof Top… Click, Click, Click

Hi. My name is Ben, and I plan to visit your website next year a lot! I’m a casual user that likes to browse the Internet, and like everyone else I know, I hate to wait. Although your website is really cool, and I love your products and services, the Internet is full of interesting places and I’m easily distracted. Oh, and did I mention that I love using my Android smartphone and iPad to play, connect, shop, bank and book travel when I’m not at work? All I want for the holidays is a speedy web and mobile site.

Here are my top 10 wishes for you and your site in 2012:

1. Please test your code/site on IE and not just Firefox before you launch it. I am one of the 50% that will continue using IE, even after they start auto-upgrades!
2. Understand the difference between browser execution and network/back-end performance. Most pages have both and you need to know which is which to optimize the page/site. One way is to monitor using a real browser.
3. Understand how your page renders. Focus on reducing upfront (pre-render) delay. It’s the one me and your other users feel the most!
4. Please make sure your third party tags (analytics and others) are below your visual content. (Did I mention rendering delays and blocks are aggravating?)
5. Please combine your external JS and CSS files. I’ve been saying this for years, but very few sites seem to follow this recommendation. Do it, and I’ll see a major improvement in the speed of your site.
6. Understand the quality your Content Delivery Network is providing. Every website is unique, and not all CDN providers are created equal.
7. Don’t worry so much about overall page size but instead focus on individual file/resource sizes. Keep them under 100K and you will limit the impact of slower connections. (Did I mention I love my smartphone?)
8. Don’t just push your desktop website to mobile. You will fail.
9. Test your mobile site… please!
10. Read Keynote’s Page Construction Guidelines. They’re chocked full of goodies to help you optimize the performance your Web pages and keep visitors like me happily clicking through them, instead of away to your competitor’s site.

What’s on your wish list for better web and mobile performance in 2012? Let me know!