Month: December 2012

Performance Trends for ???? – Smarter Systems

IF-repair by Yo Mostro (Flickr)

Most of the trending items that I have discussed in the last two weeks are things that can be done today, problems that we are aware of and know need to be resolved. One item on my trend list, the appearance of smarter performance measurement systems, is something the WPO industry may have to wait a few years to appear.

A smarter performance measurement system is one that can learn what, when, and from where items need to be monitored by analyzing the behavior of your customers/employees and your systems. A hypothetical scenario of a smarter performance measurement system at work would be in the connection between RUM and synthetic monitoring. All of the professionals in WPO claim that these must be used together, but the actual configuration relies on humans to deliver the advantages that come from these systems. If RUM/analytics know where your customers are, what they do, and when they do it, then why can’t these same systems deploy (maybe even create and deploy!) synthetic tests to those regions automatically to capture detailed diagnostic data?

Why do measurement systems rely on us to manually configure the defaults for measurements? Why can’t we take a survey when we start with a system (and then every month or so after that) that helps the system determine the what/when/where/why/how of data and information we are looking to collect and have the system create a set of test deployment defaults and information displays that match our requirements?

The list of questions goes on, but they don’t have to. Measurement systems have, for too long, been built to rely on expert humans to configure and interpret results. Now we have a chance to step back and ask “If we built a performance measurement system for the a non-expert, what would it look like?”

More data isn’t the goal of performance measurement systems – more information is what we want.

Performance Trends 2013 – Employees are Customers too

Peter Levine from Andreesen Horowitz wrote an article on The Renaissance of Enterprise Computing yesterday that finally sprouted the seed of an idea that has been dormant at the back of my brain for a few months. While the ideas of enterprise computing and web/mobile performance seem disconnected, they’re not.

When companies begin to rely on outside services (Levine mentions Box, Google Docs, and others in his article) they have given part of their infrastructure over to an outside organization. And, when you do that, this means that any performance hiccups that affect us as consumers can have a very major effect on us as employees.

Even if your company decides to purchase and deploy an enterprise application within your own infrastructure or datacenters, the performance and experience that your employees experience when using it on their desktops or on their mobile devices can affect productivity and effectiveness in the workplace. An unmanaged (read unmonitored) solution can have shut down groups in the company for minutes or hours.

Think of the call-center. No matter the industry you’re in, what increase customer calls: slow performance or a poor experience with the web/mobile application. Now, if your employees rely on a variant of the same web application to answer questions in the call-center, have you actually improved the customer experience and increased employee productivity?

Some considerations when managing, designing, or buying an enterprise application in the coming  year:

  • What do your peers tell you about their experience implementing the solution or using an outside service – has it made employees more effective and efficient?
  • Are employees already using a “workaround” that makes them more effective and efficient? Why aren’t they using the internal or mandated solution?
  • Is performance and experience a driving factor in the lack of adoption of the mandated solution?
  • Do you have clear and insightful performance information that shows when employees are experiencing issues performing critical tasks? Can you clearly understand what the root cause is?
  • Are employees experiencing issues using the application in certain browsers or on certain mobile devices? How quickly can your design or your outside service respond to these issues?
  • Are you reviewing the chosen solution regularly to understand how usage is changing and how this could affect the performance of the application in the future?

Performance issues are not simply affecting the customers you serve. Your own employees use many of the same systems and applications in their day-to-day tasks, so a primary goal of managing these application should be to ensure that the applications deliver performance and experience that encourages employees to use them, no matter whether they are developed in-house or purchased as software or SaaS.

Web Performance Trends 2013 – Third Party Services

Every site has them. Whether they’re for analytics, advertising, customer support, or CDN services, third-party services are here to stay. However, for 2013, I believe that these services will face a level of scrutiny that many have avoided up until now.

Recent performance trends indicate that while web site content has been tested and scaled to meet even the highest levels of traffic, the third-party services that these sites have some to rely on (with a few exceptions) are not yet prepared to handle the largest volumes of traffic that occur when many of their customers experience a peak on the same day.

In 2013, I see web site owners asking their third-party service providers to provide verification that their systems be able to handle the highest volumes of traffic on their busiest days, with an additional amount of overhead – I suggest 20% – available for growth and to absorb “super-spikes”. Customer experience is built on the performance of the entire site, so leaving a one component of site delivery untested (and definitely unmonitored!) leaves companies exposed to brand and reputation degradation as well as performance degradation.

In your own organizations, make 2013 the year you:

  • Implement tight controls over how outside content is deployed and managed
  • Implement tight change control policies that clearly describe the process for adding third-party content to your site, including the measurement of performance impacts
  • Define clear SLAs and SLOs for your third-party content providers, including the performance levels at which their content will be disabled or removed from the site.

When speak to your third-party content and service providers about their plans for 2013, ask them to:

  • Explicitly detail how they handled traffic on their busiest days in 2012, and what they plan to do to effectively handle growth in 2013
  • Clearly demonstrate how they are invested in helping their customers deliver successful mobile sites and apps in 2013
  • Lay out how they will provide more transparent access to system performance metrics and what the goals of their performance strategy for 2013 are.

Take control of your third-party content. Don’t let it control you.

Web Performance Trends for 2013 – Performance Optimization

As we approach the end of 2012, I will be looking at a few trends that will become important in 2013. In a previous post, I identified optimization as an important performance trend to watch. It is one of the items on a performance checklist that companies can directly influence through the design and implementation of their web and mobile sites.

The key to optimization in any organization is to think of objects transmitted to customers, regardless of where they originate, as having a cost to you and to the customer. So, a site that makes $100,000 in a day and transfers 10 million objects to customers has an object-to-revenue ratio of 100. But, if the site is optimized and only 7.5 million objects are transferred to make $100,000, that ratio goes down to 75; and if the reduction in objects causes revenue go up to $150,000, the ratio drops to 50.

This approach is simplistic and does not include the actual cost to deliver each object, which includes costs for bandwidth, CDN services, customer service providers, etc. as well as revenue generated by third-party ads and services you present to customers. The act of balancing the cost of the site (to develop and manage), the performance you measure, the revenue you generate, the experience your customers have, and the reputation of your brand is an ongoing process that must be closely considered every time someone asks, “And if we add this to the site/app…”.

There is no optimal figure for site optimization. But there are some simple rules:

  • Use Sprites where you can. Combing multiple small images into aggregated image maps that you can use CSS to display gives you a double-plus good improvement – fewer objects to download and more text (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) that can be delivered to visitors in a compressed format
  • Combine JavaScript and CSS files. Listen to your designers – they will likely try to convince that each file needs to be separate for some arcane reason. Listen and then ask if this is the most efficient way to deploy this particular function or formatting. Ask the developer to produce a cost/benefit analysis of doing it their way versus using something that is already in place
  • Control your third-party services. This means having a sane method for managing these services, and shutting them off if necessary. Have every team that is responsible for the site meet to approve (or deny) the addition of new third-party services. And those who want it better come with a strong cost/benefit analysis.

Optimization is the act of making the sites you create as effective and efficient as the business you run. No matter how “low” the cost to operate a web site is, each object on a site can cost the company more money than it is worth in revenue. And if that object slows the site down, it could turn a profitable transaction into a lost customer.

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