SYSCON

'Tis the Season - Holiday Performance Update

Holiday Shopping continues to pose a challenge for many sites after the dust settles on a less than profitable Black Friday. What are known to be the busiest days of the year for online retailers put many to the test. However, performance of these sites after the holiday rush can continue to hurt profits and send impatient last-minute shoppers elsewhere.

 At Keynote, we continuously monitor the performance of many online retailers. It is important to look at not only how these sites handle peak traffic, but how they continue to perform with heavily taxed order management systems, increased secure traffic due to the presence of registered shoppers, and now more than ever the reliance on ‘less-than-stable’ third party providers.

 We work with some of the best performing sites in their industry, and some who…well let’s say strive to be the best. But as the saying goes ‘You’re only as strong as your weakest link’. I find that even best in class organizations working year-round and investing hard fought dollars into their infrastructure frequently overlook the readiness of third parties such as ad providers, content delivery networks and analytics.

 It is true that the browser wars are back in full swing with the introduction of Google Chrome, FireFox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8. However, with the majority of users still on IE 7 – the threading model of the browser has a large impact on how fast we see pages load. Depending on the placement in the page (which is a discussion in itself) a poorly performing call to a third party can mean the difference between a page that loads in 2 seconds and one that loads in 20 (or fails to render completely).

 It is imperative that organizations hold these parties accountable for performance just as they do internally. I haven’t seen a vendor yet who hasn’t heard of an SLA. At a time when every penny counts, you need to make sure you are getting what you pay for.

Rich content - when is enough too much?

I was recently asked to perform a study of page complexity for a UK client, and was amazed to find that, in the last year alone, the average page weight across 25 UK news and media sites has increased more than 60% to 750KB, with the average number of page elements increasing more than 30%.

With the amount of content on sites increasing so rapidly, a major concern is that consumer connection speed is not increasing at the same rate. Network infrastructures vary between different geographies, but there has been a huge global increase in page traffic combined with an exponential increase in video services relatively recently. A recent study showed than more than 50% of UK consumers have an actual connection speed of less than 2Mbps, and this is not likely to change anytime soon in the UK.

Looking at the page data, a major cause of the increase is more dynamic content especially video and rich elements including Flash and AJAX.

Additionally, much of this extra content is delivered from 3rd parties particularly advert providers, which can have a disproportionate impact on page download times.

User experience is the result of a complex combination of content, interactivity, brand affinity and performance, but it is clear that the page download time is already much more of a concern and will only become more so if the content size increases continue.

Takeaways from AJAX World - It's Complicated

Today I had the opportunity to speak with quite a few developers and Web teams about what’s going on in the RIA space while presenting at AJAX World. While there is a lot of excitement out there around the new opportunities that are possible with advancing technology, we’re facing new struggles as well.

Between advanced technologies like AJAX, the increase in page sizes and third party requests, and applications often living everywhere and anywhere within the cloud, guaranteeing the best possible performance is becoming complicated.  

From my perspective, the encouraging part is conferences like AJAX World where you see so many people committed to solving problems like this to move the Internet forward – just think of where we are now compared to 5 or 10 years ago. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the session I gave, check out the presentation here – Download ajax_world_presentation_2008_keynote_final.ppt. I outline everything from the basics to Web 2.0-specific issues stemming from flash and AJAX and offer solutions, like our free KITE – http://kite.keynote.com.

What are some of the most frustrating challenges your 're facing? Do you feel like you have enough tools to keep up with growing complexity of Web apps?

Also, at AJAX World I had the pleasure of participating on a power panel with industry big shots like Bill Scott, and Brad Abrama from Microsoft – highlights from that on another blog post!