5 best practices for blazing fast website performance presented by gomez & forrester
DESCRIPTION
Customers expect great online experiences — and the bar gets higher every day. Today's consumers are web savvy; they expect blazing fast performance and the highest-quality experiences no matter what site they’re visiting. If they have to wait too long for a page to load they will abandon the site for the competition.Join Web performance experts from Gomez and Forrester Research, Inc. at this complimentary webinar to learn how to get 3 second response times from your Website, improve availability, and deliver better customer experiences. Attendees at this webinar will learn:1. How to take advantage of the latest caching technologies so that you can cache smart and cache often2. Best practices to minimize the impact of browser diversity on web application performance3. How to architect your pages for raw speed and perceived performance to ensure top performance4. Tips on how Infrastructure Operations and Marketing can partner for performance5. Diagnostic best practices to find where performance optimization opportunities existTRANSCRIPT
ImadMoulineCTO,Gomez
MikeGualtieriSeniorAnalyst,ForresterResearch
5 Best Practices for Blazing Fast Website Performance
Five Best Practices For Blazing Fast Web Site Performance Mike Gualtieri Senior Analyst Forrester Research March 23, 2010
Make your Web site faster!
5 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Agenda
• Why your customers won’t wait • Blazing fast best practices
• Recommendations
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Achieving blazing fast Web site performance is more challenging
Modern Web audiences expect more content and functionality
Firms want to provide more content and functionality
IT needs to reduce infrastructure costs
Rising tides of users make scaling more challenging
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Great User Experiences Are Useful, Usable, And Desirable
• Users can accomplish their goals Useful
• Users can easily perform tasks Usable
• Users enjoy their experience Desirable
And, fast!
Customers want more and they want it faster.
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Agenda
• What do customers want?
• Blazing fast best practices • Next practices for which to prepare
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Based upon Forrester’s ongoing Blazing Fast Web site performance research
1. Measure first, early and often
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Check the performance of your peers at http://benchmarks.gomez.com
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Web applications are increasingly assembled within the browser
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Browser performance varies widely
Source: Gomez sampled 360 million pages across 200+ Websites over a 30 day period from broadband users in the United States
Web Browser Page Load Time (in seconds)
Internet Explorer 6 9.654 Internet Explorer 7 6.740 Internet Explorer 8 4.831 Firefox 3 5.631 Firefox 3.5 4.424 Chrome 4 2.369 Safari 4 3.132
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Best practices: Measure early and often
• Measure how quickly users perform key objectives on your site.
• Baseline performance metrics with a consistent reporting frequency
• Know who is using your site and how performance varies from geography to geography.
• Use on-demand measurement to determine the effectiveness of key changes.
• Know what elements of your infrastructure are affecting performance.
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Pitfalls: Measure early and often
• Don’t measure so seldom that you can’t react to problems.
• Don’t measure the wrong things.
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2. Architect pages for speed.
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Browser versions have different capabilities
Source: www.browserscope.org November 19, 2009
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Browsers render differently
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Best practices: Architect pages for speed
• Stay abreast of client optimizations.
• Minimize server requests.
• Cache intelligently.
• Compress data. • Leverage client-side applications.
• Use page analysis tools.
• Use appliance or other software that can improve page speed (E.g. Aptimize)
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Yahoo!’s YSlow Grades Pages And Suggests Changes That May Improve Web Performance
February 2009 “Best Practices: Attaining And Maintaining Blazing Fast Web Site Performance”
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Pitfalls: Architect pages for speed
• Don’t rely on frameworks to keep up with browser technology.
• Don’t ignore user workflow speed.
• Don’t assume the HTML provided by page design tools will perform well.
3. Cache smartly to eliminate bottlenecks.
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Achieving blazing fast Web site performance is more challenging
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The user’s distance from the content matters
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Best practices: Cache smartly to eliminate bottlenecks • Test and monitor performance from your customer’s perspective.
• Address the low-hanging fruit first. – Might not be the browser
• Add an edge cache (such as Akamai, Edgecast, Limelight) if you need it.
• Consider elastic caching for: application data, sessions, page fragments, and shared application state
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Pitfalls: Cache smartly to eliminate bottlenecks
• Be sure your scale-out architecture is free of bottlenecks before implementing caching
• Don’t create caches that hold the wrong things.
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Typical IT Web architecture is designed to scale the app server tier
Relational database
Load balancer
Application server
Application server
Application server
Application server
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Elastic caching adds scaling layer to overcome the data bottleneck
Persistent data store
Load balancer
Application server
Application server
Cache node
Cache node
Cache node
Application server
Application server
4. Continually optimize your application
architecture.
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Best practices: Continually optimize your application architecture
• Monitor continuously and learn.
• Mitigate the risk of remote services.
• Scale out Web and application servers.
• Be clever about data architecture. • Divide monolithic applications to conquer them.
• Diminish the role of older or limited systems and applications.
• Group functions by protocol or type for better load balancing.
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Data can be scaled using a federated approach
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Divide Monolithic Applications To Scale Functions Independently
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Use a combination of approaches to scale Web application
NOSQL
Elastic cache
Elastic cache
Elastic cache
Load balancer
Application server
Application server
Application server
Application server
RDBMS
NOSQL
NOSQL NOSQL
Function A
Function B
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Pitfalls: Continually optimize your application architecture
• Don’t get seduced by hardware vendors.
• Don’t be a slave to prior art.
• Don’t allow syndicators to hold you hostage.
Source: amctv.com
5. Cooperate with app dev, infrastructure ops,
and user experience pros.
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Best practices: Partner with your app dev, infrastructure ops, and user experience colleagues • Collaborate with all on the performance imperative.
• Understand the desires of your interactive marketing colleagues.
• Conduct joint Web site change performance audits.
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Pitfalls: Partner with your app dev, infrastructure ops, and marketing colleagues • Don’t engage in finger-pointing.
• Don’t circumvent IT operations.
• Don’t underinvest in performance testing.
39 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Agenda
• Why your customers won’t wait
• Blazing fast best practices
• Recommendations
40 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Make your Web site faster!
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To create a blazing fast Web architecture:
• Test and monitor performance from your customer’s perspective.
• Assess your current Web architecture to identify bottlenecks or areas of opportunity.
• Address the low-hanging fruit first based upon greatest impact and lowest cost.
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Next practices • Cloud computing is here to stay
– How can you evolve your architecture to take advantage of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) either internal, public, and hybrid cloud?
• Prepare for mobile – How will you test and improve the performance of
your mobile applications?
– What approach will you use to develop the applications?
• New technologies: Elastic platforms and NOSQL – How can elastic caching help improve performance
– Can NOSQL help you scale your data?
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Follow these best practices
1. Measure first, early, and often
2. Architect pages for speed
3. Cache smartly to eliminate bottlenecks
4. Continually optimize your architecture
5. Cooperate with app dev, ops, user experience, and marketing
44 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Thank you Mike Gualtieri
+1 617.613.6145
Twitter: mgualtieri
www.forrester.com
5BestPracticesforBlazingFastWebsitePerformance
ImadMouline,CTO,Gomez
ThePerformanceOptimizationChallenge
BalancingCostvs.Performance
Operations
Development CloudandCDNProviders
AmIoverpayingforperformancegains?
EfficientOptimization
Arethesethemostcosteffectiveimprovementstomake?
IsourcodeoptimizedforspeedANDcost?
“WorkingwithPros”‐OptimizingPerformanceandCosts
NormalConfiguration
ParallelizedConfigurationIfyouarepayingbasedonvolumethenoptimizeusingparalleldownloading
“ContinuallyOptimizeyourApplications”–FocusingonImprovedResponseTimesYieldsBusinessResults
Measureperformanceundernormalandpeakconditions–Testyourapplicationsatpeakandnormaltrafficlevels,tofindalltheproblemsandoptimizationopportunities
Improveresponsetimestoreduceabandonmentrates–Gomezresearchshowsthatdecreasingpageresponsetimefrom10to2secondsreducesabandonmentratesby38%
CompareyourselfagainsttopcompetitorsandInternetleaders
“CacheSmartly”‐ValidateCachingattheSERVER
LongFirstBytetimesapotentialserver‐sidecachingopportunity
“CacheSmartly”‐ValidateCachingattheEDGE
In‐housedeliveredcontent
OutsourcedCDNdeliveredcontent
“CacheSmartly”‐ValidateCachingattheBROWSER
Safari4.x
InternetExplorer7.x
InternetExplorer8.x
Firefox3.x
Chrome
“ArchitectPagesForSpeed”–PLUSPerceivedPerformance
Eachbrowserhasdifferentperformanceandrenderingcharacteristics
Source: Gomez Real-User Monitoring Real users around the world Broadband
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Second
s
Rawpageloadtime
360M pages over 30 days 200+ sites
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Second
s
Rawpageloadtime
Perceivedpageloadtime
Firefox InternetExplorer
“ArchitectPagesForSpeed”–AnalyzeAcrossBrowsers
MajorISP
LocalISP
MobileCarrier
Internet
ContentDeliveryNetworks
3rdParty/CloudServices
Browsersanddevices UsersUsers
Storage
WebServers
AppServers
DBServers
Mainframe
LoadBalancers
MobileComponents
Network
“MeasureEarlyAndOften”‐Fromthe‘Outside‐in’
TheWebApplicationDeliveryChain
ZoneofcustomerexpectationTraditionalzoneofcontrol
“Outside‐in”customerpointofview
Ismybackendoptimized?
Ismyhostingproviderperformingwell?
IsmyWebsitesloweddownbyvendors?
IsmyWebsiteoptimizedacrossbrowsers?
“MeasureEarlyAndOften”‐AcrossBrowsers
ResponsetimesdifferacrossFirefoxandIEagents
InternetExplorerAgent
FirefoxAgent InternetExplorerAgent
FirefoxAgent
Don’t forget to monitor across browsers as availability & performance issues can also be browser specific
Puttingyourplaninaction–HowGomezcanhelp
BestPractices
GomezCapabilities DeploymentTesting
ProductionMonitoring
MeasureEarlyAndOften
Monitorperformance&availabilityfromtheend‐users’perspective
ArchitectPagesForSpeed
Measureclient‐side&optimizeperceivedperformanceacrossmultiplebrowsers
ContinuallyOptimize
Monitorandoptimizeresponsetimesforend‐userstoimprovebusinessresults
CacheSmartly
Validatetheeffectivenessofcachingstrategies
PartnerwiththePros
EvaluatetheperformanceofcloudandCDNservices
Testingcloudapplicationswithworld’smostcomprehensiveperformanceandtestingnetwork
WebPerformanceManagementandLoadTesting
100+locations
Backbone
WebPerformanceManagementandLoadTesting
100,000+locations
LastMile YourActualUsers
RealUserMonitoringWorldwide,whereveryour
usersare
Formoreinformationvisitwww.gomez.comorcontactusatinfo@gomez.comor+1781.778.2700
Reduceddowntime45%
Reducedseven‐steptransactiontimeby50%
Increasedconversions10%
Validateddecisiontoconsolidatethreedatacenters
Achievedunder3secondresponsetimeand99%+availability
Reducedhomepageloadtimefrom11.3secondsto3.4seconds
Improvedpageloadtimes23%
Saved50%+instaffandfees
GomezCustomersEnjoyMeasurableBenefits
ImadMoulineCTO,Gomez
MikeGualtieriSeniorAnalyst,ForresterResearch
5BestPracticesforBlazingFastWebsitePerformance
Questions?