Wednesday, August 25, 2010

DynaTrace AJAX Edition

Whats a web KPI?  Simply put, web Key Performance Indicators are measurements that tell you how you are doing against your objectives.   The old saying "You can't improve what you can't measure" is more applicable than ever when doing business on the web.  Website performance has increasingly become the "Secret Sauce" of doing business on the web, and as many of the Alpha Geeks have stated, speed should always be product feature #1.

At Velocity 2010 in San Jose, DynaTrace launched DynaTrace AJAX edition. This is a great tool for tracking website performance KPI's.   DynaTrace has a great article on recommended web performance KPI's  and a demo of the AJAX edition tool.

DynaTrace AJAX Edition

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Velocity 2010 - Fast By Default

Velocity 2010 is a wrap.   In case you are not familiar with Velocity, this was its 3rd year.   This conference brings the best minds and technology together in the web operations and performance management space and was totally sold out.   Sponsors included the likes of Google, Gomez, Keynote, Yahoo, DynDNS, Strangeloop and Facebook.


  • Why should you care about a 1 second or even 500 Millisecond latency?

    Because your competitors do!


Speed Matters!  There is no more debate, no more theorizing, no more question.   Speed effects your bottom line.   

The Velocity Conference is all about speed and what can be done to squeeze out every ounce of speed for the end user.

From the Velocity web site:
Topics and Themes for Velocity 2010
Velocity attendees are a unique tribe of disaster gurus, special ops professionals, software developers, academics, sysadmins, developers, engineers, and more. They're the hidden heroes that keep the trains running on time, the people you call at 3 in the morning when your site is down. They're the most skilled at repeatedly rising to the challenge of finding answers to complex problems and are always on the leading edge of emerging technologies and solutions.
Velocity gives attendees access to speakers and the in-depth, technical content that will move the dial furthest for web ops and development professionals most responsible for the health of their company's IT infrastructure. Topics and themes we're focusing on in 2010 include:
  • Mobile Web Peformance
  • Multiple Data Center Management
  • Network Latency
  • Cloud Computing
  • Scalable Video and Social Gaming
  • HTML5
  • Configuration Management
  • Webcaching and Memecaching
  • Green Architecture
  • Metrics


Source:  Velocity 2010 http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2010

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Introducing Google Caffeine (now Kaffein) UNOFFICIALLY launched

Matt Cutts (Google) blogged about Caffeine in Nov 2009, and it appears that google has been integrating the release of Caffeine (now Kaffein) gradually.  

Starting on about April 1st, depending on your location on the planet, you may have seen some changes to your ranking.

Think your website speed doesn't matter?   One of the new ranking factors with the rollout of Kaffein is speed.   Kaffein incorporates a new speed ranking algorithm, and although google claims that this new factor only effects 1% or less of all search results, given that all other ranking factors are equal, your website speed will rank you above or below your competitors.   Its a fact that bounce rates are higher amongst slower sites, and google factors this in as a less desirable search result.   Cutts offers an explanation of speed based ranking and debunks a few misconceptions on his April 9 blog entry.  "speeding up your website isn’t just something that can affect your search rankings–it’s a fantastic idea for your users".

Still don't think your site speed is that big of a deal?   Lets talk about pay-per-click Ad-Words.   I am getting reports from customers, that with the rollout of Kaffein, ad-words are costing more, and the additional cost is directly related to page speed.  I have yet to verify this, but several marketing departments concur.

Google also seems to be ranking results and ads based on IP address geo-coding, meaning that relevancy now relates to your actual geographic location, or at least where google THINKS you are.

If you want to compare Kaffein results against the old google, check out http://www.comparecaffeine.com/ .   Ranking differences seem to be fluctuating, indicating that google may still be tweaking the new algorithm.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Tools - "Site Performance" and "Page Speed" by Google

Similar to Yahoo ySlow, Google labs provides "Page Speed" in their "Labs" section of "Site Performance" webmaster tools.

"Site Performance" trends and analyzes your site page performance while "Page Speed" evaluates performance from the client point of view and makes recommendations on how to improve the end user performance experience. These are extremely useful tools for tracking and improving your end user performance related experience.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/



Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Gomez 2 Minute Explainer

Gomez is the leader in Web Performance Monitoring.   This 2 minute explainer lends great insight into their approach, and the importance of managing the web delivery chain.
http://www.gomez.com/resources/video-library/web-performance-monitoring-two-minute-explainer/


Monday, January 11, 2010

$$ Load Time is Money $$

How much is your page load time costing you ? Gomez (Compuware) just launched a calculation tool. Plug in your numbers and see.        http://www.compuware.com/fastcalc/

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Fast or Furious?

We made it past the holidays.   Some on-line retailer's "got it" and some did not.    Were your customers FAST or FURIOUS ?