Ben Rushlo was on IT Conversations partially to promote his company’s tool (KITE) but they also talked about performance testing and measurement in general.
- Don’t think of performance in terms of pages, but transactions
- Not all parts of a site have he same performance requirements
- Performance is relative to your location
- Real browsers replicate real users (as compared to just raw http)
- For high-speed users, the size of page or elements doesn’t matter. It is all about the number of round trips. Even if you use a CDN, you have to go out to the network to get to the CDN.
- You can optimize for first-time users, or return users. But do you know enough about them to make the tradeoffs that are necessary?
- Caching is good, but good design upfront is better
- Good design is not just about the user, but helps the bottom-line of the company
- Does your website handle the situation where a third-party provider is down (ads, analytics, etc.)
- Do you have an SLA with your third-party?
- Is your third-party component more important than the reason the customer is at the site
- Do you know what all the calls on your page to third-parties are doing?
- You can’t post-engineer performance into sites anymore, the way you could 5 years ago
Adam:
Thanks for posting Ben’s points here.
Here’s a couple of follow-up thoughts for your readers:
1. KITE is free. Consider adding a free KITE account to your bag of tricks. There is nothing like seeing the performance of your site from half way around the world to prove whether optimizations deliver the results you are looking for. http://kite.keynote.com.
2. Weekly intelligence about how fast FAST is is free too. Ben’s group drives the Performance Indices of major websites and we publish weekly roll-ups of his results weekly for free. See who is fast (or not) as a benchmark of what real browser performance is out there. While we sell detailed index data to our customers who want to compare how they are doing by comparison throughout the day and/or during major events, the weekly info is pretty interesting and free. Hop on over to http://www.keynote.com/keynote_competitive_research/ to check it out weekly.