Collected thoughts about software and site performance ...
Web performance matters. Responsive sites can make the online experience effective, even enjoyable. A slow site can be unusable. This site is about online performance, how to achieve and maintain it, its impact on user experience, and ultimately on site effectiveness.
Home | Entries from March 1, 2007 - April 1, 2007, in reverse date order:
Joel Spolsky on Meetings
Joel Spolsky on Meetings
Wisdom at Work: 1
Don't try to write poetry in a committee meeting
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.
Chris Loosley
in Blogs and Publications, Book Reviews, Life, The Universe, and Everything, Wisdom at Work
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The Five Stages of Tuning
Nagraj's Law of Tuning Choices
Check out all the options before spending money on faster hardware
The first post in this series discussed Moore's Law and Wirth's Law. It reviewed how, at an industry level, ever faster processors have been neutralized by ever-growing software. Here I discuss how to manage the balance between hardware and software at the enterprise or application level with a systematic approach to performance tuning.
Performance is all about supply and demand. Performance problems are the visible evidence of a mismatch between hardware supply and software demand -- between the amount of work the software wants to do and the hardware computing resources (processor, memory, storage, or network capacity) available to handle that work. Such mismatches can be caused by resource utilization or contention:
Chris Loosley
in Performance Management, Optimization and Tuning, Performance Wisdom
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Adobe Acrobat 8 and Software Bloat
Lately I've been working with a lot of documents, so I was getting ready to invest in an Adobe Acrobat licence. To be able to merge documents of different types would be particularly useful. So it seemed like serendipity today when I got an email from Adobe with the title, Combine it all into one. It offered a free 30-day trial of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, which it said could "combine spreadsheets, e-mails, web pages, and forms into one searchable PDF package". Perfect! I thought, I'll download it now. And that's when the problems started.
Tags: Adobe, Acrobat, software bloat, performance, Web site usability, usability, Wirth's Law, download time
Chris Loosley
in Performance and Usability , Software products
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Ajax Performance Management
Performance Management (SLM) Challenges for Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIA's)
In my post on Ajax Wisdom, I reviewed the progress of Ajax against the Gartner Hype Cycle, concluding that Ajax had not yet advanced beyond the Trough of Disillusionment. I referred to Michael Mahemoff's recent post about Ajax concerns as just one piece of evidence.
Michael responded (see the comments) that the mere existence of concerns does not indicate anything, because any viable technology has outstanding problems to be solved. To judge Ajax I should really look at the progress that has already been made in solving problems. So let's do that ...
Chris Loosley
in Performance Management, Measuring Performance, Rich Internet Applications, Ajax Wisdom
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Ajax Wisdom
Ajax and Design
Ajax Wisdom: 1
Don’t design your page around Ajax.
Having working in the computer business since 1967, I'm not so easily captivated by the latest high-tech fad. I've seen the Gartner Group's hype cycle play out enough times to become skeptical of the current "hot" technology. But the hype cycle provides a useful framework for evaluating the progress of new technologies. Like Ajax, for example.
Why Moore's Law is Irrelevant
Wirth's Law
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster
Many developers seem to assume that Moore's Law, with its prosect of endless capacity growth, will rescue them from any performance problem. But this vision of unlimited scalability will always be just that -- a vision, not a reality.
If you're reading anything on this site, I think its safe to assume that you're familiar with Moore's Law. Anyone old enough to have owned a few computers has experienced Moore's Law at work in the progressive increases in the processing power of each new generation of hardware.
But while Moore's law is almost a household term, how many people have even heard of Wirth's Law? Yet it describes a parallel phenomenon, and one that arguably has affected our lives every bit as much -- the systematic slowing of software performance. In fact, as Wirth observed, in the race between hardware efficiency and software bloat, the software developers are "winning".
Chris Loosley
in Foundations of Performance, Optimization and Tuning, Performance Wisdom
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Trading Volume Slows Performance
When stock markets everywhere took a big hit last Tuesday, volume on the New York Stock Exchange nearly doubled its typical level, topping 4 billion shares for the first time ever.
Barron's Online is a weekly magazine that covers U.S. financial information, tracks company statistics, and reports on market developments. Last week, Theresa W. Carey of Barron's decided that Tuesday's trading surge created "the perfect opportunity to see how some of the online brokers ... coped with extremely heavy traffic". The result was an interesting story -- Online Stress Test -- about the performance of leading brokerage sites during the trading peak. To sum up it up, the bigger the broker, the slower the site:
Chris Loosley
in Blogs and Publications, Performance in the News
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