isham research
These two graphs came from the Google Webmaster Tools Console within minutes of each other. This data is available free of charge to all websites verified with Webmaster Tools. Once again, it's a matter of knowing where to look.
Site A had over three times the performance of Site B. Now guess which site was spidered more often, and which one got the most traffic. In this particular case, a lazy programmer had designed a site using SSI to save an hour or two's programming - converting the SHTML pages to static HTML tripled the speed of the site.
There are many ways of providing dynamic content. Sometimes it's the only way to solve a problem - sometimes it's programmer laziness, and sometimes there seems to be no other reason than that it's possible and a neat trick. In all cases, it places server resource availability directly into the service time critical path. And if the server is shared with other workloads, response time can become erratic.
Few people consider response time and transfer rates when buying web space and designing a site. Hosting is priced in gigabytes - which are cheap - and not milliseconds, which aren't. But they are the most critical of all parameters and one of the aspects isham research routinely monitors for its customers.
That's not the only performance issue. Any form of code execution on the server - from simple server-side includes (the mark of a lazy programmer) to complex content management systems has a potential to affect performance and
Service Level Agreements are essential. Although good Flash designers can produce economical code, most don't - and images of all kinds are the bitter enemies of response time. Not everyone has broadband and mobile users may be paying by the kilobyte. Web page designs that load sometimes dozens of little graphics to decorate a page can place a huge load on a server, and to compound this many are configured to defeat client-level caching.
It's trivially easy to check the server headers. A pragma no-cache means a client moving from one page to another on a given site must reload even the graphics common between the pages. For a badly-designed site, perhaps dozens of them.
A recent study published by the BBC suggests people's patience expires at just FOUR seconds.
About half of mature net-shoppers - who have been buying online for more than two years or who spend more than $1,500 (£788) a year online - ranked page-loading time as a priority.
It found that a third of those questioned abandon websites that take time to load, are hard to navigate or take too long to handle the checkout process.
The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.
So people used to be prepared to wait eight seconds - now it's halved to four. This trend will continue. A quarter of a century ago, IBM researchers explored the link between response time and productivity:
[Walter J. Doherty] and Richard P. Kelisky, Director of Computing Systems for IBM's Research Division, wrote about their observations in 1979, "...each second of system response degradation leads to a similar degradation added to the user's time for the following [command]. This phenomenon seems to be related to an individual's attention span. The traditional model of a person thinking after each system response appears to be inaccurate. Instead, people seem to have a sequence of actions in mind, contained in a short-term mental memory buffer. Increases in SRT [system response time] seem to disrupt the thought processes, and this may result in having to rethink the sequence of actions to be continued."
And these people were talking about sub-second response times. In a competitive environment, "it's enough if it works" is not good enough.
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