MEASUREMATTERS #9

A collection of must read articles highlighting the

importance of webperformance for your

online business

Web Performance Links

• Velocity Europe – High Performance Berlin!

• HTTP Archive: new code, new charts

• Trendwatching on the HTTP Archive

• To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

• How server-side performance affects mobile user experience

• Google Chrome Plus Extensions: Plus or Minus?

Velocity Europe – High Performance Berlin!

Velocity Europe is less than two weeks away. It’s happening November 8-9 in Berlin at the Hotel Maritim ProArte. I’ve heard good things about the venue and am excited to get there and check it out.This event has been a long time coming. A handful of web performance and operations savants (including members of the Program Committee) have been encouraging us for years to bring Velocity to Europe, and now it’s actually happening. And (drum roll please) the price is only EUR 600 (excl. VAT) if you use the 20% discount code veu11sts. (And don’t forget about the freeVelocity Online Conference this week – see more below.)

The Velocity Europe speaker line-up is exceptional. Some highlights include:Jon Jenkins from Amazon.com is talking about their approach to the challenges of mobile browsing. Jon is the Director of Software Development for Amazon Silk. I’m looking forward to more details about Silk’s split architecture.

Tim Morrow delivers the background for Betfair’s promise to deliver a fast experience to their customers, and their progress on that promise.Theo Schlossnagle is a recognized leader at Velocity. He’s giving two talks on web operations careers and monitoring.Estelle Weyl joins Velocity for the first time talking about the nuances of mobile rendering performance. I learn something new everytime I hear Estelle speak, so am excited to welcome her to Velocity.Ivo Teel discusses the balance we all face between features and performance and how they’re handling that at Spil Games.Jeff Veen knows the importance of 3rd party performance and availability as the CEO of Typekit. Jeff’s an amazing, engaging speaker. Reading his session description gave me goosebumps with anticipation: Jeff sat on a couch in the Typekit offices, staring out the window, and wondering if everything their company had been working towards was about to slip through their fingers…There’s much much more – lightning demos, browser vendor talks, Allspaw on anticipating failure,Mandelin on JavaScript performance – I’ve got to stop here but please check out the entire schedule.I want to give a shout out to the Velocity Europe Program Committee: Patrick Debois, Aaron Peters,Schlomo Schapiro, Jeroen Tjepkema, and Sean Treadway. They’ve participated in numerous video concalls (yay Google Hangouts!) to review proposals, build the program, and shape Velocity to be a European conference. And they might have one more card up their sleeve – more on that later.

You can get a free warm-up for Velocity Europe at the Velocity Online Conference this week. It’s Wednesday October 26 9-11:30am PDT. John Allspaw, Velocity co-chair, has rounded up four speakers to cover several hot topics including monitoring, global DNS, and making yourself even more awesome(!). It’s free, but you have to register for Velocity OLC if you want to get in on the conversation.If you’re heading to Berlin you should also check out CounchConf Berlin on Nov 7. NoSQL has great performance benefits and Couchbase is a good choice for many mobile apps. Usecouchconf_discount for 10% off registration.The last time I was in Berlin was for JSConf.eu 2009. The city had a high tech vibe and the crowd was extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic. I’m excited to get back to Berlin for Velocity Europe and do the web performance and operations deep dives that are the core of Velocity. If you want to have a website that’s always fast and always up, Velocity Europe is the place to be. I hope to see you there.

Source: Steve Souders (blog), Posted: oktober 24, 2011 http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/10/24/velocity-europe-high-performance-berlin/

HTTP Archive: new code, new chartsThe HTTP Archive is a permanent record of web performance information started in October 2010. The world’s top 17,000 web pages are analyzed twice each month to collect information such as thenumber and size of HTTP requests, whether responses are cacheable, the percent of pages witherrors, and the average Page Speed score. The code is open source and all the data is downloadable.

The next big step is to increase the number of URLs to 1 million. The biggest task to get to this point is improving the database schema and caching. This past week I made some significant code contributions around caching aggregate stats across all the web sites. Even with only 17K URLs the speed improvement for generating charts is noticeable.The new stats cache allows me to aggregate more data than before, so I was able to add several trending charts. (The increases/decreases are Nov 15 2010 to Oct 15 2011.)

percent of sites using Google Libraries API – up 6%percent of sites using Flash – down 2%percent of responses with caching headers – up 4%percent of requests made using HTTPS – up 1%percent of pages with one or more errors – down 2%percent of pages with one or more redirects – up 7%

Most of the news is good from a performance perspective, except for the increase in redirects. Here’s the caching headers chart as an example:

Source: stevesouders.com/blog, Steve Souders, Posted: oktober 21, 2011 http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/10/20/http-archive-new-code-new-charts/

HTTP Archive: new code, new chartsMost of the news is good from a performance perspective, except for the increase in redirects. Here’s the caching headers chart as an example:

I dropped the following charts:popular JavaScript libraries – I created this chart using handcrafted regular expressions that attempted to find requests for popular frameworks such as jQuery and YUI. Those regexes are not always accurate and are hard to maintain. I recommend people use the JavaScript Usage Statistics from BuiltWith for this information.popular web servers – Again, BuiltWith’s Web Server Usage Statistics is a better reference for this information.sites with the most (JavaScript | CSS | Images | Flash) – These charts were interesting, but not that useful.popular scripts – This was a list of the top 5 most referenced scripts based on a specific URL. The problem is that the same script can have a URL that varies based on hostnames, querystring parameters, etc.The new stats cache is a great step forward. I have a few more big coding sessions to finish but I hope to get enough done that we can start increasing the number of URLs in the next run or two. I’ll keep you posted.

Source: Steve Souders Steve Souders, Posted: oktober 21, 2011 http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/10/20/http-archive-new-code-new-charts/

Trendwatching on the HTTP Archive

Steve put up a great post about the HTTP Archive last month that I’ve been meaning to pile onto. As one of the archive’s financial supporters, Strangeloop is obviously a big fan and I’m always talking it up with our customers.  (I was on the phone last week, pimping our mobile product with one of my favourite analysts — another data geek — who didn’t know it existed. She was very interested when I pointed out the incredibly exciting database we are creating.)A few trends jumped out at me when I compared the first run in November 2010 to the latest run September 15, 2011.As Steve pointed out in his post, payload is going up… and up… and up.When I dug into this, I focused my attention on the top 100 sites because these guys represent my customers and I am very familiar with them. I wasn’t surprised to see total payload going up by 26% in just under a year — a pretty amazing number when you think about it. Images grew by close to 30% and scripts by close to 26%. It is tough to make pages fast when they grow this quickly.

When I see payload going up, my first instinct is to blame the unconverted — the big guys who just don’t get it yet. To test my assumption, I took a look at the players who do really get it. I was surprised by my findings:

Source: Joshua Bixby , Web Performance Today, Posted: september 30, 2011 http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2011/09/30/trendwatching-the-http-archive/

Trendwatching on the HTTP Archive

Overall, I was really surprised to see the big guys not practicing what they preach.Social content is growing, and Google+ is neck-and-neck with Facebook.I was also surprised at the growth in social on the top 100 sites. I was most surprised by the growth in Google+ and the fact that it is equal to Facebook. See below:

Popularity of JavaScript libraries in 2010:

Popularity of JavaScript libraries in 2011:

Twitter has pulled ahead, from 2% to 8%. Facebook has grown from 2% to 5%. And right out of the blocks, Google+ has surged to a tie with Facebook. Some people say Google+ is a flash in the pan, others say it’s a serious contender. I’ll be very interested in seeing where these numbers are at next year.

Source: Joshua Bixby , Web Performance Today, Posted: september 30, 2011 http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2011/09/30/trendwatching-the-http-archive/

Trendwatching on the HTTP Archive

On the one hand, Amazon decreased total payload by almost 15%. But they were the only site that showed improvement. Every other major player I checked increased their total payload: Google by 34.5%, Gmail by 25%, Yahoo by 18%, and Microsoft by 30%.Not surprisingly, the number of requests increased across the board as well:

Source: Joshua Bixby , Web Performance Today, Posted: september 30, 2011 http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2011/09/30/trendwatching-the-http-archive/

Trendwatching on the HTTP Archive

1 out of 4 of the top 100 sites still don’t use cache headers.

This is a core best practice, but about 1 out of 4 of the top 100 sites still don’t use it. This is a humbling reminder that, despite the great strides front-end optimization has made in the past couple of years, we can’t assume everyone is on the same page.

Correlations to render time and load time have inverted.

Both of these sets of graphs intrigued me. It’s interesting to see the decrease across the board in all of the items as a contributor to render time. At the same time, we see an increase in correlation to load time. The fact that these two graphs seem inverted makes me wonder if there’s a connection between them.

Source: Joshua Bixby , Web Performance Today, Posted: september 30, 2011 http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2011/09/30/trendwatching-the-http-archive/

Trendwatching on the HTTP Archive

I asked Hooman Beheshti, our VP of Product, about this, and here are his thoughts:

Round trips correlate to load time a lot more this year, and are in front. With all the 3rd party and social networking tags, this matches what we see with our customers. Round trips continue to be a massive contributor to load time, maybe now more than ever.Transfer size may be second, which may fool us into thinking we’re getting things from point A to point B faster, but their impact on total load time has gone up. So, it may not have as big an impact as roundtrips, but it matters more now than it did before.The fact that domains used on a page is a new big-boy contributor to load time (and leads the charge now in render time) may point to the fact that, collectively, we may not be doing as well as we thought with modern browsers and parallelism. And by that, I don’t mean concurrent connections to the same domain – just concurrent connections, period. Either that, or the domains-per-page is increasing (by 30% according to this, and by 20%+ for the top 100) and so is its impact on performance. Third-party tags could also be a contributor to this.That’s all I can think of. I don’t have general theories on why the numbers are bigger for one and smaller for the other. It’s interesting, though, that the trend for render and load times themselves is not a part of the comparison and analysis. It would be interesting to see if these metrics are going up or down on average.

I had a blast digging into the HTTP Archive, and I strongly encourage you to do the same, if you haven’t already. And if you have any theories about my findings, or findings of your own, I’d love to hear them.

Source: Joshua Bixby , Web Performance Today, Posted: september 30, 2011 http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2011/09/30/trendwatching-the-http-archive/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

There is no doubt that performance is important for your business. If you don’t agree you should check out what we and others think about the Performance Impact on Business or remember headlines like these:Target.com web site was down after promoting a new labels: Article on MSNTwitter was down and people complaining about it on Facebook: Huffington Post ArticlePeople stranded on Airports because United had a software issue: NY Time ArticleThe question therefore is not whether performance is important or not. The question is how to ensure and verify your application performance is good enoughUse your End-Users as Test Dummies?In times of tight project schedules and very frequent releases some companies tend to release new software versions without going through a proper test cycle. Only a few companies can actually afford this because they have their user’s loyalty regardless functional or performance regressions (again – only a few companies have that luxury). If the rest of us were to release projects without proper load testing we would end up as another headline on the news.Releasing a new version without proper load testing is therefore not the correct answer.Don’t let them tell you that Load Testing is hardWhen asking people why they are not performing any load tests you usually hear things along the following linesWe don’t know how to test realistic user load as we don’t know the use cases nor the expected load in productionWe don’t have the tools, expertise or hardware resources to run large scale load testsIt is too much effort to create and especially maintain testing scriptsCommercial tools are expensive and sit too long on the shelf between test cyclesWe don’t get actionable results for our developersIf you are the business owner or member of a performance team you should not accept answers like this. Let me share my opinion in order for you to counter some of these arguments in your quest of achieving better application performance.Answer to: What is Realistic User Load and Use CasesIndeed it is not easy to know what realistic user load and use cases are if you are about to launch a new website or service. In this case you need to make sure to do enough research on how your new service will be used once launched. Factor in how much money you spend in promotions and what conversion rate you expect. This will allow you to estimate peak loads.Learn from your Real UsersIt’s going to be easier when you launch an update to an existing site. I am sure you use something like Google Analytics, Omniture, or dynaTrace UEM to monitor your end users. If so, you have a good understanding on current transaction volume. Factor in the new features and how many new users you want to attract. Also factor in any promotions you are about to do. Talk with your Marketing folks – they are going to spend a lot of money and you don’t want your system to go down and all the money wasted.  Also analyze your Web server logs as they can give you even more valuable information regarding request volume. Combining all this data allows you to answer the following questions:What are my main landing pages I need to test? What’s the peak load and what is the current and expected Page Load Time?What are the typical click paths through the application? Do we have common click scenarios that we can model into a user type?Where are my users located on the world map and what browsers do they use? What are the main browser/location combinations we need to test?

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

The following screenshots give you some examples on how we can extract data from services such as Google Analytics or dynaTrace UEM to better understand how to create realistic tests:

What are the top Landing Pages, the load behavior and page load performance? Testing these pages is essential as it impacts whether a user stays or leaves the web site.

Browser and Bandwidth information allows us to do more realistic tests as these factors impact page load time significantly

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

Analyzing click sequences of real users allows us to model load test scripts that reflect real user behavior

CDN, Proxies, Latency: There is more than meets the eyeWhat we also learn from our Real Users is that not every request makes it to our application environment. Between the End User and the Application we have different components that participate and impact load times: Connection Speed, Browser Characteristics, Latency, Content Delivery Network or Geo Location. A user in the United States on Broad Band will experience a different page load time then a user on a mobile device in Europe that are both accessing an application hosted in the US. To execute tests that take this into consideration you would actually need to execute your load from different locations in the world using different connection speed and different devices. Some Cloud based Testing Services offer this type of testing by executing load from different data centers or even real browsers located around the globe. One example is Gomez First Mile Testing.

Answer to: We don’t have the tools or the expertiseThis is a fair point. As Load Testing is usually not done on a day-to-day basis as it is hard to justify the costs for commercial tools, for hardware resources to simulate the load or for people that need constant training on tools they hardly use.All these challenges are addressed by a new type of Load Testing: Load Testing done from the Cloud offered as a Service. The benefits of Cloud based Load Testing areCost Control: you only pay for the actual load tests – not for the time the software sits on the shelfScript generation and maintenance is included in the service and is done by people that do this all the timeYou do not need any hardware resources to generate the load as it is generated by the Service Provider

Answer to: It’s too much effort to create and maintain scriptsAnother very valid claim but typically caused by two facts:a)      Free vs. Commercial Tools: too often free load testing tools are used that offer easy record/replay but do not offer a good scripting language that makes it easy to customize or maintain scripts. Commercial Tools put a lot of effort into solving exactly this problem. They are more expensive but make it easier, saving time.b)      Tools vs. Service: Load Testing Services from the Cloud usually include script generation and script maintenance done by professionals. This removes the burden from your R&D organization.

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

Answer to: Commercial Tools are too expensiveA valid argument if you don’t use your load testing tool enough as then the cost per virtual user hour goes up. An alternative – as you can probably guess by now – are Cloud Based Load Testing Services that only charge for the actual Virtual Users and Time executed. Here we often talk about the cost of a Virtual User Hour. If you know how often you need to run load tests, how much load you need to execute over which period of time it will be very easy to calculate the actual cost.No actionable data after Load TestJust running a load test and presenting the standard load testing report to your developers will probably do no good. It’s good to know under which load your application break – but a developer needs more information than: We can’t handle more than 100 Virtual Users. With only this information the developers need to go back to their code, add log output for later diagnostics into the code and ask the testers to run the test again as they need more actionable data. This usually leads to multiple testing cycles, jeopardizes project schedules and also leads to frustrated developers and testers.

Too many test iterations consume valuable resources and impact our project schedules

To solve this problem Load Testing should always be combined with an Application Performance Management Solution that provides rich, actionably in-depth data for developers to identify and fix problems without needing to go through extra cycles and in order to stay within your project schedules.

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

Capturing enough in-depth data eliminates extra test cycles, saves time and money

The following screenshots show some examples on what data can be captured to make it very easy for developers to go right to fixing the problems:The first one shows a load testing dashboard including load characteristics, memory consumption, database activity and performance breakdown into application layers/components:

The dashboard tell us right away whether we have hotspots in Memory, Database, Exceptions or in one of our application layers

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

In distributed applications it is important to understand which tiers are contributing to response time and where potential performance and functional hotspots are:

Analyzing transaction flow makes it easy to pinpoint problematic hosts or services.

Methods executed contributed to errors and bad response time. To speed up Response Time Hotspot analysis we can first look at the top contributors …

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

… before analyzing individual transactions that have a problem. As every single transaction is captured it is possible to analyze transaction executions including HTTP Parameters, Session Attributes, Method Argument, Exceptions, Log Messages or SQL Statements making it easy to pinpoint problems.Are we on the same page that Load Testing is important?By now you should have enough arguments to push load testing in your development organization to ensure that there won’t be any business impact on new releases. I’ve talked about Cloud-based Load Testing services multiple times as it comes with all the benefits I explained. I also know that it is not the answer for every environment as it requires your application to be accessible from the Web. Opening or tunneling ports through firewalls or running load tests on the actual production environment during off-hours are options you have to enable your application for Cloud-based Load Testing.One Answer to these Questions: Compuware Gomez 360 Web Load Testing and dynaTraceNew Combined Gomez and dynaTrace Web Load Testing Solution provides an answer to all the questions above and even more. Without going into too much detail I want to list some of the benefits:Realistic Load Generation using Gomez First Mile to Last Mile Web TestingIn-Depth Root-Cause Analysis with dynaTrace Test Center EditionLoad Testing is a Service that reduces in-house resource requirementsKeep your costs under control with per Virtual User Hour billingWorks throughout the application lifecycle – from production, to test, to development

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

Running a Gomez Load Test allows you to execute load from both Backbone Testing Nodes as well as Real User Browsers located around the world. Especially the Last Mile is an interesting option as this is the closest you can get to your real end users. The following screenshot shows the Response Time Overview during a load test from the different regions in the world allowing you to see how performance of your application is perceived in the locations of your real end users:

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

To Load Test or Not to Load Test: That is not the question

From here it is an easy drill down in dynaTrace to analyze how increasing load affects performance as well as functional health of the tested application:

Source Andreas Grabner, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 29, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/28/to-load-test-or-not-to-load-test-that-is-not-the-question/

How server-side performance affects mobile user experience

Testing mobile web sites on the actual device is still a challenge. While tools like dynaTrace Ajax Edition make it very easy to get detailed performance data from desktop browsers, we do not have the same luxury for mobile.I was wondering whether desktop tooling can be used for analyzing and optimizing mobile sites. My idea was to start testing mobile web sites on desktop browsers. Many websites return mobile content even when requested by a desktop browsers. For all sites one has control over it is also possible to override browser checks.The basic rationale behind this approach is that if something is already slow in a desktop browser it will not be fast in a mobile browser. Typical problems patterns can also be more easily analyzed in a desktop environment than on a mobile device.I chose the United website  inspired by Maximiliano Firtmans talk at Velocity. I loaded the regular and the mobile site with Firefox and collected all performance data with dynaTrace. The first interesting fact was that the mobile site was much slower than the regular site.

Source Alois Reitbauer, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 2, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/02/how-server-side-performance-affects-mobile-user-experience/

How server-side performance affects mobile user experience

mobile.united.com is slower than united.comThis is quite surprising as the mobile site has way less visual content as you can see below. So why is the site that slow?

This is quite surprising as the mobile site has way less visual content as you can see below. So why is the site that slow?

When we look at the timeline we see that the mobile site is only using one domain while the regular site is using an additional content domain. So serving everything from one domain has a serious impact on performance

Source Alois Reitbauer, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 2, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/02/how-server-side-performance-affects-mobile-user-experience/

How server-side performance affects mobile user experience

I checked the latest result from BrowserScope to see how many connections mobile browsers can handle. They are using up to 35 connection which is quite a lot. The United mobile ,site does not leverage this fact for mobile.

Connections per domain and total for mobile browsers

Looking at the content reveals two optimization points. First a lot of the content is images which could be sprited. This would then only block one connection and additionally also speed up download times. The second point is that the CSS which is used is huge. A 70k CSS file for a 12k HTML page is quite impressive.

Very large CSS file on mobile.united.com

Source Alois Reitbauer, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 2, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/02/how-server-side-performance-affects-mobile-user-experience/

How server-side performance affects mobile user experience

While these improvements will make the page faster they are not the biggest concern. Looking at the requests we can see that there are several network requests which take longer than 5 seconds. One of them is the CSS file which is required to layout the page. This means that the user not see a nicely layouted page within less than 5 seconds (not taking network transfer time into consideration). So in this case the server used for the mobile website is the real problem.

Request with very high server times

ConclusionThis example shows that basic analysis of mobile web site performance can also be done at the desktop. Especially performance issues caused by slow server-side response times or non-optimized resource delivery can be found easily. The United example also shows how important effective server-side performance optimization is in a mobile environment. When we have to deal with higher latency and smaller bandwidth we have to optimize server-side delivery to get more legroom for dealing with slower networks.

Looking at the content delivery chain which start at the end user and goes all the way back to the server-side it becomes clear that any time we lose on the server cannot be compensated by upstream optimization. 

Source Alois Reitbauer, DynaTrace Blog, Posted: september 2, 2011 http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/09/02/how-server-side-performance-affects-mobile-user-experience/

Google Chrome Plus Extensions: Plus or Minus?

As anyone who’s written serious software knows, application performance issues come in all shapes and sizes, and not necessarily when or where you expect to see them. It’s one story when a well defined (and hopefully well managed) development team handles the entire application. The story becomes entirely different when you’re talking about open source software, open platforms for the web, or social networks. The more social the modern web environment becomes for the consumer and developer, the more gotchas the unsuspecting users are likely to see.

Growing Pains for Google’s Chrome and Google+

As I mentioned in a guest post that ReadWriteWeb published today, Google Chrome and the Google+ platform seem to be suffering from growing pains. Chrome has a well-deserved reputation for speed and reliability. Fast forward to the Google+ social experiment and Chrome’s role as a platform for third party extensions. Chrome’s supremacy might be quickly compromised by the “social developers” for Google+.Possible Performance Problems with Google+ Extensions

The new extensions can be developed by practically anybody, from a seasoned web programmer to a high school kid dreaming about becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. The extensions might have performance problems of their own (read: quickly hacked together code) that affect the perceived user experience, or they might have some hard-to-anticipate dependencies on external data streams, web services, or servers and thus indirectly affect Chrome's overall performance. All of these issues can and do result in substantially reduced browser performance and a degraded user experience. And that takes some of the shine off the Chrome brand.

What Do You Think? Get Involved in the Discussion...

We are well known in the business of helping developers produce high-quality applications and extensions with the least effort. Please share with us and the community what kind of problems you face in developing the Google+ ecosystem, what tools you use now, and what tools you think you might need in the future.Have you ever built a Chrome extension? How do you recommend testing it?

Source Sergei Sokolov , SmartBear Blog, Posted: september 11,2011 http://blog.smartbear.com/post/11-08-03/Google-Chrome-Plus-Extensions-Plus-or-Minus.aspx

Google Chrome Plus Extensions: Plus or Minus?

As anyone who’s written serious software knows, application performance issues come in all shapes and sizes, and not necessarily when or where you expect to see them. It’s one story when a well defined (and hopefully well managed) development team handles the entire application. The story becomes entirely different when you’re talking about open source software, open platforms for the web, or social networks. The more social the modern web environment becomes for the consumer and developer, the more gotchas the unsuspecting users are likely to see.

Growing Pains for Google’s Chrome and Google+

As I mentioned in a guest post that ReadWriteWeb published today, Google Chrome and the Google+ platform seem to be suffering from growing pains. Chrome has a well-deserved reputation for speed and reliability. Fast forward to the Google+ social experiment and Chrome’s role as a platform for third party extensions. Chrome’s supremacy might be quickly compromised by the “social developers” for Google+.

Possible Performance Problems with Google+ Extensions

The new extensions can be developed by practically anybody, from a seasoned web programmer to a high school kid dreaming about becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. The extensions might have performance problems of their own (read: quickly hacked together code) that affect the perceived user experience, or they might have some hard-to-anticipate dependencies on external data streams, web services, or servers and thus indirectly affect Chrome's overall performance. All of these issues can and do result in substantially reduced browser performance and a degraded user experience. And that takes some of the shine off the Chrome brand.

What Do You Think? Get Involved in the Discussion...

We are well known in the business of helping developers produce high-quality applications and extensions with the least effort. Please share with us and the community what kind of problems you face in developing the Google+ ecosystem, what tools you use now, and what tools you think you might need in the future.Have you ever built a Chrome extension? How do you recommend testing it?

Source Sergei Sokolov , SmartBear Blog, Posted: september 11,2011 http://blog.smartbear.com/post/11-08-03/Google-Chrome-Plus-Extensions-Plus-or-Minus.aspx

MeasureMatters is the blog of MeasureWorks focusing on the importance of web performance optimization for your online revenue.

About MeasureWorks

MeasureWorks provides Web Performance Optimization.MeasureWorks measures, analyzes and improves the quality of experience of online retailers, travel agencies, financial institutions and other online services. We observe their visitors closely, find out how they perceive quality, and identify which areas require improvements. We enable our clients to create loyal customers by improving their services proactively from a business perspective.

Do you want to maximize revenue and drive customer loyalty by identifying problems before customers do? And quantify how web performance impacts your business results? Please view www.measureworks.nl to see what we can do for you!

MeasureMatters