Performance, Performance, Performance
Everybody is on broadband today, so why not throw up huge 300k+ Adobe Flex applications on all of our web pages? Let’s have 25 unique images and 10 CSS files on every page too!
Performance doesn’t matter anymore right? Wrong.
First, as people have adopted faster connections the Internet, expectations for speed have also increased. Where, 7 years ago, people may have been willing to wait 15 seconds for a page to load, many don’t want to wait 3 seconds today. many large commercial sites are starting to catch on to this and put big efforts into performance.
We are simply becoming less patient.
So you’ve benchmarked all the objects on your home page and it should load over a typical DSL connection in around 8 seconds. That’s not necessarily going to be reality. depending on where your server and your customer are located in relation to the Internet backbone, and each-other, latency can more than double that time. Remember that each request and each response travels over a number of hops.
It’s also important to remember there are still people on dial-up and people using various devices to connect to the Internet - including phones. A well performing site will go a long way to getting more customers.
80% of web performance problems are a result of the UI. The biggest cuplrit is number of objects per page. Every external file (image, CSS, javascript, flash file) you load means opening a socket to your server. The number of concurrent sockets are limited by the browsers, and each new connection takes time. Apart from that, individual object size is a factor.
Caching, using content management servers like Akamai, and other strategies can make huge differences in your performance. It is still important
