Rob Saker's Blog

We’ve always known that users have limited patience when visiting sites.  Akamai recently released a study showing users become impatient when pages take longer than 2 seconds to load.  TubeMogul monitored performance for 192 million video streams over 14 days and found that when a video rebuffers, 81.19% of viewers navigate away from the page.

Tools to help ensure optimal performance and availability have been available to large commercial sites for years, but the cost of these capabilities has left them out of reach of the average web site operator.  The existing technologies have also dealt largely with the big opportunities, allowing developers to become lazy in their coding practices.

2010 sees the introduction of two key developments that will drive additional innovation and adoption of affordable performance technologies to the masses:

1. Google will begin including performance information as part of page rank.
2. Increased emphasis on earned media places a unique strain on web site performance.

Google’s decision to include performance as part of the page rank algorithm is significant. Traffic to retail, travel, health, music and others derive at least 30% of their traffic from organic search.  The composition of referral sources continues to shift, and with respect to earned media and other drivers organic search will continue to be a primary driver of traffic for the foreseeable future.  Web sites must continue to make search engine optimization a focus.

Not only is the percentage of traffic driven to web sites from social sources increasing, it is increasing the volatility of traffic patterns. A look at the usage of any web site prior to 2007 would be fairly predictable.  Web sites would experience occasional spikes, often in conjunction with e-mail blasts, but traffic followed predictable patterns.  E-mail blasts are scheduled, allowing organizations to have warning of coming loads in traffic.

Most technology organizations size their environment to handle the normalized traffic patterns and provide enough capacity to handle heavy usage times.  They factor expected usage, peak usage, growth, and design an environment that allows for a multiple of that.

The Digg effect (or Slashdot effect) changed the expectation for traffic and places a unique strain on environments.  An article that was prominently featured on either Digg or Slashdot (and now Twitter and other sources), could unexpectedly drive enough traffic to overload the server capabilities, similar to a distributed denial-of-service attack.  Organizations could not just allow for a few multiples, they needed to have capacity to scale to 20-30x multiples.  And quickly, and inexpensively, and to decrease the capacity when the traffic had diminished.

The good news?  Solving for availability will also improve overall performance. And vice versa.

Before jumping into the expected developments in 2010, there are numerous small steps that can be taken to improve performance of web sites.

What Optimization Trends Should We Expect in 2010?

The trends I expect to see reach mass audience in 2010 are in three trending categories:

• Continued effort to place static content as close to the user as feasible.
• Maturity in the development of open-source CMS engines and plug-ins.
• Migration to scalable, virtualized environments.

What trends should we see for the small web site operators in 2010?

• Expect developers to push more processing to the browser.  Google Chrome’s javascript engine rewrote the rules for performance on the browser.  Firefox, IE and Safari have had no choice but to improve their respective javascript engines, and the past year has seen a rebirth in innovation in the browser.  These faster javascript engines have improved the actual performance to the user.  I expect developers to minimize the amount of lifting down by application servers to the extreme, placing as much dynamic functionality at the browser level.  This will improve measurement by search engines (which typically don’t execute javascript as part of measurement).
• Popular CMS engine plug-ins go from growth to consolidation.  RobSaker.com leverages no less than 20 plugins. Each of these plugins contains unique javascript files, requiring individual files to be sent and processed by the browser.  Expect popular plug-ins to incorporate additional functionality, or for these features to be adopted to the main branch of code within the CMS engine.
• Application caching/PHP accelerators become standard.  As recently as October 2008, a significant 32.8% of web servers ran PHP.  Java and ASP both benefit from the fact that their code compiles, while PHP is a scripted language that lags both Java and ASP in performance.   To counter this, PHP can be leveraged to decrease memory and processor utilization.  Hardware from companies such as eAccelerator that cache applications improve performance anywhere from 2-10 times their uncached speed. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and other PHP content management systems have seen the introduction of caching plug-ins that create static versions of files, but remain limited in adoption.  Expect caching technologies to become mainstream or adopted within the main branch of code in the respective CMS engines.
• Seamless, widespread CDN and cloud storage integration. Advanced CDN providers such as Akamai with dynamic network path optimization will remain out of reach for the majority of web sites, but we are beginning to see plugins for Content Delivery Networks that will streamline the integration effort with storage services. As demand grows across the low-end market to improve speed and serve rich media, expect aggressive, young providers (Amazon S3, Limelight, CacheFly) to offer targeted solutions and tools making the use of their CDN services easier.
• Cloud and grid hosting become the norm.  Grid and cloud offerings have been available for a few years, offering tremendous scalability on demand, but ease of adoption has been a challenge.  Offerings have been directed at larger organizations or required more in-depth technical knowledge.  Several hosting providers tested grid hosting services in 2009 using popular CMS products.  The kinks appear to be worked out and grid hosting is being offered as an entry-level hosting option on major providers.  Expect the trend to continue, with software being developed specifically to take advantage of cloud and grid hosting.

What optimization steps do you use on your web site? What innovations do you think we should see in 2010?

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