Tag Archives: performance

How Fast is Your Web Site?

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Web site performance data has never been more readily available.

PATRICK MEENAN

The overwhelming evidence indicates that a Web site’s performance (speed) correlates directly to its success, across industries and business metrics. With such a clear correlation (and even proven causation), it is important to monitor how your Web site performs. So, how fast is your Web site?

First, it is important to understand that no single number will answer that question. Even if you have defined exactly what you are trying to measure on your Web site, performance will vary widely across your user base and across the different pages on your site.

We will discuss active testing techniques that have traditionally been used, then explain newer technologies that permit the browser to report accurate timing data to the server.

How Fast is Your Web Site?

 

Related:

High Performance Web Sites

Building Scalable Web Services

Improving Performance on the Internet

 

The Evolution of Web Development for Mobile Devices

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Building Web sites that perform well on mobile devices remains a challenge.

NICHOLAS C. ZAKAS

The biggest change in Web development over the past few years has been the remarkable rise of mobile computing. Mobile phones used to be extremely limited devices that were best used for making phone calls and sending short text messages. Today’s mobile phones are more powerful than the computers that took Apollo 11 to the moon, with the ability to send data to and from nearly anywhere. Combine that with 3G and 4G networks for data transfer, and now using the Internet while on the go is faster than my first Internet connection, which featured AOL and a 14.4-kbps dialup modem.

The Evolution of Web Development for Mobile Devices

 

Related:

Making the Mobile Web Faster

Mobile Media: Making It a Reality

Mobile Devices in the Enterprise: CTO Roundtable Overview

 

Thinking Methodically about Performance

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The USE method addresses shortcomings in other commonly used methodologies.

BRENDAN GREGG, JOYENT

Performance issues can be complex and mysterious, providing little or no clue to their origin. In the absence of a starting point—or a methodology to provide one—performance issues are often analyzed randomly: guessing where the problem may be and then changing things until it goes away. While this can deliver results—if you guess correctly—it can also be time-consuming, disruptive, and may ultimately overlook certain issues. This article describes system-performance issues and the methodologies in use today for analyzing them, and it proposes a new methodology for approaching and solving a class of issues.

Thinking Methodically about Performance

 

Related:

The Price of Performance

Performance Anti-Patterns

Thinking Clearly about Performance

 

Extending the Semantics of Scheduling Priorities

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Increasing parallelism demands new paradigms.

RAFAEL VANONI POLANCZYK, ORACLE SOLARIS KERNEL GROUP

Application performance is directly affected by the hardware resources that the application requires, the degree to which such resources are available, and how the operating system addresses its requirements with regard to the other processes in the system. Ideally, an application would have access to all the resources it could use and be allowed to complete its work without competing with any other activity in the system. In a world of highly shared hardware resources and general-purpose, time-share-based operating systems, however, no guarantees can be made as to how well resourced an application will be.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2282337

Related: Real-World Concurrency, Performance Anti-Patterns, Abstraction in Hardware System Design