Category: Web Performance

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify the benefits of performance improvements. Many tools try to show you data and many rule-based tests and best practices exist to describe the goals, but there is still no clear connection in business people’s heads between particular site’s performance and savings or profits that performance optimization projects will bring.

As part of ShowSlow project I’m working on making it easier to get the technical answers, but my experience with real world web development projects and Web Performance Meetups movement is showing that business answer is often more important then technology answer here as ultimate requirements of performance are not technical (like in scalability, for example), but psychological.

But I’d like to look at this business problem from a new perspective that is different from traditional tweaking / improvements / benefit approach. I think that speed of interaction is such an essential product quality that by breaking traditional web performance barriers companies can create fundamentally new products and make completely new things possible in the cloud-based web application space.

Of course I’m talking about today’s Google Instant announcement. New user experience they introduced completely breaks traditional search paradigm similar to how AdWords broke advertising paradigm. More over, achieving this technical goal and building the system of this complexity is extremely hard, but this is exactly what makes it easier for them to keep competition at bay.

Google is not the first company to bake web performance into a new product. Facebook before them created new experience with their activity feed pages using various innovative technologies like BigPipe and HipHop, for example. Incredible statistics that brought them to the leading positions on the charts of the web heavily depend on ability to deliver next level of quality for their social product. Both Facebook and Google, invested in many backend and front end technologies that improve web performance and that allows them to keep unprecedented levels of user engagement.

It is great to see that competition between the two giants is moving web performance to the next level!

Again, competitive advantage cab be built by close attention to web application performance as well as new kind of products that would be impossible to develop with common latency levels and speed of interaction. To get to next levels of usability and to provide new experiences, companies must embrace web performance as a critical element in their product development.

What do you think? How can other big companies on the web change their products using high performance and get ahead of competition? Can you do that at your company?

A few people got interested in drop-in web performance .htaccess file so I decided to move it to a separate project on Github and invite all of you to participate in building a simple solution for web site performance that anyone can use!

github.com/sergeychernyshev/.htaccess

Go, fork it! We have a lot of work to do:

• Stoyan Stephanov suggested that we should move to whitelisting for gzip
• Paul Irish also shared .htaccess he created as part of HTML5 boilerplate project
• since I posted about this to Apache mailing list, I was also hoping to create fast-httpd.conf similar to fast-nginx.conf with a set of instructions for fast by default web servers

Check out the issue tracker, add your own suggestions / bug reports and vote for those that you think are important.

P.S. If you’d like to include sample .htaccess file with your Subversion project, just run

svn propedit svn:externals .

and add following line to it:

sample.htaccess http://svn.github.com/sergeychernyshev/.htaccess.git

I did this in SVN Assets.