By now everyone knows that page load time is critical – It’s the one unifying factor that can ruin absolutely any app or website in existence. As optimization pushes the limits on how fast content can be delivered, milliseconds can make a huge difference to a user, as well as a company’s bottom line. Interestingly, it turns out there’s something that could be even more important than how long it actually takes – and that’s how long a user thinks it takes. At the past few Velocity conferences, this topic has gained momentous attention and acknowledgement, and with good reason. […]
When we think about websites and the infrastructure they run on, we tend to oversimplify. In the web development and web performance industries though, we know better. Gone are the days where even a semi-popular site could be handled by one server. Like the CDN, there are other components that need to be considered, such as the load balancer. A load balancer is a separate server which acts as a reverse proxy and directs incoming user traffic to one of many servers connected to the load balancer. This ultimately eases the load for all web servers. An analogy I came […]
Presenting Web Performance to More Businesses Mobile web performance will continue to grow at a rapid rate in 2014. Shoppers are expected to make more transactions on mobile platforms compared to traditional desktop. With no signs of slowing down, customers are also expecting retail mobile sites to perform at the same speed as their desktop site. Prior to the new year, a few retailers started their resolutions earlier by optimizing their smartphone sites. The drugstore chain CVS was indexed with 30 other retailers with an average load time of 7.00 seconds. By cleaning their site, CVS managed to have a […]
The Importance of Critical Rendering Path In the field of web performance, professionals would suggest that the critical render path is an important concept. What is the critical render path? Basically, it’s the code and resources required to render an initial view of a web page. The rendering path can be viewed as the chain of events that occur to make your webpage appear on a browser. The “critical” aspect would integrate only the most important components to render only the initial view of your webpage. In order to display a simple web page, the browser goes through a series […]
Google 300ms Delay In some areas of web performance, there are stories of users shaving off 10ms-90ms in order to deliver a fast and fluid user experience. Chrome 32 for Android, which is currently in beta, was experiencing a 300ms for their chrome app. The 300ms occured between the tap and the event of the action being triggered. The pause was due to the app making sure that a user wasn’t doubling tapping to zoom in. If a user visits a site that isn’t optimized for mobile, the web page is zoomed out so they are able to see the […]
Thoughts on Performance Culture The performance culture has changed drastically since it’s early beginning. Notifying everyone of it’s important isn’t important anymore because everyone knows that it is important. Through events like Velocity, the word has gotten out to the mass that performance matters. It matters to the business and the users. As people are becoming aware of web performance, more questions are raised as how to implement a culture of performance in the industry. To answer that, some companies are integrating web performance team into their workforce. The web performance team is usually tasked with scavenging the web application […]
Numerous articles are being delivered to the internet everyday. Not everyone has the time to read every articles of interest to them. To help facilitate updates in the web performance world, here are a series of summaries to keep readers updated. Akamai Technologies Inc acquires DDOS company Prolexic Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Prolexic in exchange for a net cash payment of about $370 million. The transaction is expected to occur in the first half of 2014. Although Akamai already has a service to protect online companies from DDoS (distributed denial of service )attacks, CEO Tom […]
In the past few months, nginx (pronounced “Engine X”) has become The Little Engine That Could. This is most evident in Rails deployments and in Zimbra 5, where it replaced perdition for IMAP/POP3 proxying. For Rails, it is typically replacing Apache 2.2 proxy_load_balancer as a front-end to Mongrel. One of our engineers, Joe Williams, decided to put both system to the test with a Battle Royale. Check out the results. http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/ http://www.joeandmotorboat.com/2008/02/28/apache-vs-nginx-web-server-performance-deathmatch/