What’s wrong with ViewState Tokens? ViewState tokens are a common performance issue I come across while helping customers due to the size of these tokens. I’ve found some information about performance improvements, but I have not tested any them. What is a ViewState token? It is ASP.NET’s way to ensure the state of the page elements sent to a browser match what the browser sends back. It is an encoded string sent out to the user which gets sent back to your server in a POST request. The main problem with this kind of token is that it needs to […]
It’s a great week on the internet! This week in web performance the preservation of net neutrality and new announcements from Google and Apple make headlines. FCC votes to preserve net neutrality, classifying broadband as a utility Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to approve the proposed net neutrality rules for both wireless and fixed broadband. The proposed rules will disallow paid prioritization, as well as the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. After overwhelming public outcry, this win for advocates of net neutrality is being called “the free speech victory of our times” and “an […]
Last November, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new database service, named Aurora, which appears to be a real challenger to commercial database systems. AWS will offer this service at a very competitive price, which they claim is one-tenth that of leading commercial database solutions. Aurora has a few drawbacks some of which are temporary, but the many benefits far outweigh them. Benefits Using hardware specially built for Aurora, AWS has come up with a service that tightly integrates database with hardware, Aurora delivers over 500,000 SELECTS/sec and 100,000 updates/sec. That is five times higher than MySQL 5.6 running the […]
Update: Mobile-friendliness added as a ranking signal Starting April 21st, Google will add mobile-friendliness as a factor in its ranking algorithm. Test out your URL using their mobile friendliness test to see if your page meets the new requirements, and keep reading for help adjusting your site. Every year mobile traffic is growing. This year 41.2% of all cyber monday traffic came from mobile. It’s a trend that every business should start to plan, and develop for. Options for Mobile Optimized Experiences Based on figures provided by the mobile experts at Flurry, app usage is increasing while mobile web surfing is decreasing. With […] 
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Andy Kucharski for several years on various performance testing projects. He’s recognized as one of the top Drupal performance experts in the world. He is the Founder of Promet Source and is a frequent speaker at conferences, as well as a great client of LoadStorm. As an example of his speaking prowess, he gave the following presentation at Drupal Mid Camp in Chicago 2014. Promet Source is a Drupal web application and website development company that offers expert services and support. They specialize in building and performance tuning complex Drupal web applications. Andy’s […]
Spring is here! Historically, this time of the year is representative of growth and renewal. It’s the perfect time for cleaning up your house, your yard, and your website. Keeping a modern website running smoothly can be time consuming and resource intensive. Modernizing your website may never become effortless, but this process can definitely become more manageable, maybe even enjoyable. This list provides an overview of quick and easy to apply tricks – including information on image optimization, general code cleanup , and using Gzip – to zip through clean up and arrive at a happy site. Before you start,choose […]
The last app monitoring tool review on our tour is AppDynamics. There’s more than meets the eye with AppDynamics. In terms of features, AppDynamics is huge in both depth and breadth. The app has potential for use in large firms who want to keep track of everything going on in and with their application. This is because each account can have multiple users monitoring multiple web apps. Setup I noticed something strange when I began to install the agent. I didn’t have the option to select the PHP agent! This was unexpected because AppDynamics says that they support PHP applications […]
Previously, the team checked out NewRelic and all its capabilities. Even though we were impressed with the app monitoring and UI as-is, we missed out on some detailed server resource monitoring. We looked forward to the next player in the app and server monitoring services, AppFirst. At first glance, AppFirst is more simplified and monitors some of the same apps as NewRelic such as Java, PHP, and Ruby. In this post, I will go through the team’s experiences with AppFirst as a monitoring tool. Setup Like last time, the first thing to do was get the agent. AppFirst calls them […]
As the name implies, the Web Performance Lab is all about performance optimization. We felt it was our duty to investigate server-side monitoring as part of our industry. We also needed a monitor that could serve us accurate, reliable data. Read on for a review of our experiences working with New Relic. What is Server-side Monitoring? In a nutshell, it is a way for you to watch your web and app servers for performance issues using a monitoring service. The lab’s first go-to was New Relic; a big player in the application performance monitoring arena. The goal was to monitor […]
Introduction When December rolled around, I had been with the Web Performance Lab for 4 months. By then, it was time for another realistic experiment. For months, my focus had primarily been AWS management and scaling Magento in addition to my blogging duties. I was asked to approach this project as if I had been dealing with one of our valued clients. We had one of our software engineers act as an e-commerce vendor who happened to use Magento. He laid out some requirements, then I discussed it with him and went to work. I was pretty excited about this […]