Web Performance Matters

Do you subscribe to email newsletters? If you're like me, you get lots of them. New ones appear in my inbox every morning. They pile up, demanding to be read. In fact, they seem to breed like rabbits, producing new offspring -- when did I express an interest in Enterprise VOIP Security Architecture issues? Sometimes in a housekeeping splurge I delete a few dozen at once, suffering a momentary twinge of anxiety at having perhaps missed something important. So usually I skim them before hitting the delete button.

TechTarget's Search Software Quality service seems to be especially prolific, but is also a regular source of interesting references -- like TheServerSide.com, the subject of a recent note. According to the site's home page:

Java Performance Management for Large-Scale Systems

There are many classes of enterprise applications that have stringent performance and scalability requirements. TheServerSide.com has assembled a collection of resources to help you better design, develop, test and manage high performance, large-scale systems - learn new and innovative approaches for performance tuning, memory management, concurrent programming, JVM clustering and more.

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Your new Web application is almost ready to go live, but you need to be sure it will handle the projected traffic -- before that traffic hits the site. You probably already know that you can't just collect up your working test scripts and loop through them at high speed.

And just five minutes with Google should be enough to convince you that software performance testing is not a trivial matter.

So what should you do?

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Joel Spolsy is a software developer in New York City. Since 2000 he's been writing Joel on Software, a blog about software development, management, business, and the Internet. I don't visit every day, but whenever I return I find articles that keep me reading.

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Web site download speed and performance tuning

Continuing my series of posts on Web performance guidelines, today I'm reviewing one chapter of a new book -- Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists [Sitepoint] -- by Shirley Kaiser of SKDesigns, published by Sitepoint in July 2006.

Sitepoint's practical publications are well known among Web developers, and Kaiser deserves credit for devoting a full chapter to site performance alongside all the useful advice on other topics. As its title states, this book does not cover topics in great depth. Each checklist item is stated, then discussed briefly.

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Continuing my series on Web performance guidelines, today I am reviewing another book -- Speed Up Your Site, by Andrew B. King, published by New Riders in 2003.

When I was reviewing Web Usability Books, I promised to cover Speed Up Your Site, but never got around to doing so -- for reasons I will explain. A full table of contents listing all 19 chapters is available online; in summary, the book has six parts:

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Today I'm going to look at another list of Top Ten Web Performance Tuning Tips, following up on my promise to review Web site and application performance advice.

Today's list of tuning tips was created by Patrick Killelea, the author of Web Performance Tuning, first published by O'Reilly in 1998, then revised in 2002. When the second edition came out, Patrick also updated his 1998 top ten list, presumably to reflect changes in the rapidly maturing Internet and Web environment.

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Today I am continuing my review of Web Usability books, from the perspective (described here) of someone who believes that Performance Matters:

Usability for the Web by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D. Wood

Subtitled Designing Web Sites That Work, this book is about managing the design process, with the term design being used in its widest sense. In the introduction, the authors define Usability as the product of several design goals: functionally correct, efficient to use, easy to learn, easy to remember, error tolerant, and subjectively pleasing.

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Today I am continuing my review of Web Usability books, from the perspective (described here) of someone who believes that Performance Matters:

The Design of Sites by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay and Jason I. Hong

As its title suggests, this book is written for anyone involved in the design of a Web site. In the preface and on their site the authors say: Its focus is tilted more toward Web design professionals, such as interaction designers, usability engineers, information architects, and visual designers.

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Today I am continuing my review of Web Usability books, from the perspective (described here) of someone who believes that Performance Matters:

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen is a famous usability guru. He writes, speaks, and consults on Web site design and usability, and his 1999 book is a classic. It is surely the best-seller on this subject, having been translated into 21 languages. According to the New Riders Press publisher's introduction over 250,000 Internet professionals around the world have turned to this landmark book.

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I have twice promised to recommend books on Web Usability, so it's about time I got on with it. I have organized the books I like on a scale from simplest to most comprehensive. Today I will review the first, and simplest, of my recommendations.

Before we start I have to point out that I am not an expert in the subjects these authors devote most of their pages to, which I have labeled Clarity in my four-dimension usability model. My particular interest in writing these reviews is not primarily in the authors' expertise in the Clarity dimension, but in the extent to which they also acknowledge or discuss the dimensions of Availability, Responsiveness, and Utility.

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