2011 was an exceptional year for articles and information about web application performance. At Loadstorm, we read a lot of great articles on the subject because it interests us deeply. Since you are reading this, you must be a perf geek too - and we are glad you are here.

We went back to pick some of our favorite sources from last year, and selected 10 really good ones. They may not be the most high-profile because those tend to be about/for the big corporations and many times are paid for by sponsors (e.g. HP, IBM). Those sponsorships have an influence on the people they interview, the technologies they recommend, and the author's perspective. We prefer digging around for the more techie, smaller sites to find data supported from facts.

I hope you find the following resources helpful about the importance of performance, benchmarking, and the mechanics of performance optimization for mobile computing.

 

The Importance of Web Performance

How important is good performance? The folks at Web Performance Today ran an informal analysis of how consumers on Twitter responded to under-performing sites. Answer: not well at all!

Companies whose sites lagged were often savaged on social media. The lesson is clear: poor performance can have an instant impact on a company's reputation. WPT's ad hoc analysis echoes a more formal study back from 2010, when Foviance and CA EMEA hooked up users to EEG skull caps and measured their stress levels in response to slow sites. Foviance found that stress and agitation increase dramatically when users are dealing with poorly performing sites. 71% of such users end up blaming the Web site owner or Web host for their pain and suffering. Additionally, if consumers encounter problems online, 40% will go to a rival website and 37% will abandon the transaction entirely. Only 18% said they would report a problem to a company,