Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby to speak at the 2012 Content Delivery Summit

We are very pleased to announce that Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby will be presenting at the 2012 Content Delivery Summit on May 14, joining a lineup that includes speakers from Amazon CloudFront, Cisco, Comcast, Dell, EdgeCast, and F5 Networks.

The Content Delivery Summit is a one-day conference designed to bring together telecom carriers, service providers, content owners, and industry vendors for a detailed look at CDN platforms for the delivery of video and content acceleration. Developed and chaired by Dan Rayburn, the Summit includes case studies on real-world deployments, demos of new technology platforms, and discussions on business model considerations for web acceleration and media delivery.

Joshua will be presenting a session entitled Marrying CDNs with Front-End Optimization for Maximum Acceleration:

Many content owners are already using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache content closer to their visitors, but CDNs don't reduce the number of requests required to render each page, and they have no impact on browser efficiency. Front-end optimization (FEO) picks up where CDNs leave off, transforming the content itself so that it renders as quickly as possible in the browser.

In this presentation, attendees will see real-world examples of how leading e-commerce sites have combined CDN and FEO forces to reach new levels of performance for content-rich pages. Get real numbers on how quickly content-rich sites loaded pre-acceleration, then with just a CDN, then with a combined CDN/FEO solution.

For more information: 2012 Content Delivery Summit

Check out other upcoming Strangeloop events. 

Velocity Profile: Hooman Beheshti

As part of the buildup to the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference in June, O'Reilly Media has created a "Velocity Profiles" series, which highlights the work and knowledge of web ops and performance experts. We're very proud that our VP Technology, Hooman Beheshti, is kickstarting the series.

O'Reilly Online managing editor Mac Slocum talked to Hooman about how he got into web ops and performance, the biggest problems he's encountered, and the tools he relies on most. Here's a snippet from their interview, in which Mac and Hooman talk about one of the greatest challenges in the performance industry: measurement.

MAC: What's the toughest problem you've had to solve?

HOOMAN: In the world of web performance, measurement remains a huge challenge. There are way too many tools, metrics, and vendors out there, all doing measurement differently, and ironically, all legit! So, the challenge isn't always finding the right thing to measure, it's to understand which subset of metrics to consider based on the situation.

Add to that the fact that there's a lot of confusion about this propagated by everyone who thinks their way is the only right way, coupled with the possibility that we may not actually have the right measurement yet, and this becomes an incredibly complex issue. I can't say that we've solved it, but I do keep finding myself learning new things and educating people about these complexities. So, the fact that people are listening and wanting to learn is a positive step toward solving the problem.

Read the full interview: Velocity Profile: Hooman Beheshti

Check out Hooman's upcoming Velocity session: The 90-Minute Mobile Optimization Life Cycle

Strangeloop makes Network World's 2012 Fave Raves list

AutoAnything CTO Parag Patel explains to the editors of Network World why he nominated the Strangeloop Site Optimizer as his favorite IT product:

"Website acceleration became a priority for us in the fall of 2009, as we were gearing up for Black Friday. Site Optimizer was easy to implement and delivered immediate results. After being deployed, Site Optimizer instantly cut our page load times in half.

"We conducted a 50/50 test of our site's traffic and learned that making our pages faster had a major impact on key metrics: On the accelerated site, conversions increased by 9%, order size by 11%, and sales by 12%. These improvements are extremely significant on an annual basis."

Each year, Network World asks IT pros what they love -- which tech products make their lives easier, provide stellar security and compliance, and help keep end users happy and productive. The top 20 are corralled into the Fave Raves roundup. This year, Strangeloop is joined by companies like F5, Meraki, and Compuware Gomez. 

Next...

Learn how Site Optimizer makes web pages faster in this 3-minute video explainer.

Find out how we cut load times in half and gave conversions a 9% boost at AutoAnything.

New case study: Wine.com accelerates load times by up to 45% across all browsers

The team at Wine.com had a clear understanding of their performance challenges: serving eight versions of each content-rich page across the country to customers using older browsers. They also knew they had their work cut out for them when it came to finding a solution that would take them to their goal of delivering sub-3-second pages to their customers.

"Not only do we serve more than 13,000 product pages in a year, we also have to serve eight different versions of each page, due to the complex legal stipulations for shipping wine to various states," explains Wine.com CTO Geoffrey Smalling. "When a visitor comes to our site and clicks on a product link, our site has to scan the legal requirements for that person’s state, dig up the content that correlates to their state’s shipping laws, then serve a fully tailored page -- all in less than three seconds."

Wine.com was also constrained by the fact that many of its visitors were using dated browsers. "It took us a while to pinpoint this issue, but we eventually realized that a number of our highest-spending customers work in the financial services sector, and they were placing orders from work. Many of these customers were restricted to using Internet Explorer 6 and 7, which our site was not optimized for. As a result, these people were getting really sluggish pages."

This problem was compounded by the fact that Wine.com's datacenter is housed on the west coast, while a significant portion of its customer base lives on the east coast. Moving that payload across the country resulted in pages that loaded, at best, in about four seconds.

Four-second page load: Not fast enough

While some companies would consider four seconds a performance success, Wine.com knew this wasn’t a laurel to rest upon. Their goal was under three seconds.

"A four-second download was acceptable at one time, but today it’s far too slow, given advancements in computer technology and growing consumer expectations," says Mr. Smalling. "Getting closer to two seconds was an ambitious goal, but we had to reach it or lose potential customers, especially first-time visitors."

Why Strangeloop?

"When we started our search for a performance solution, Strangeloop immediately stood out from the crowd," says Mr. Smalling. "Being able to optimize for all browsers and operating systems, consistently and securely, is an impressive claim. We knew that if a single product could do all that for us at an affordable cost, that would be a fantastic achievement."

Wine.com completed their Strangeloop Site Optimizer implementation just in time for the 2010 holiday shopping season, and they saw immediate dramatic improvement in all the metrics they cared about:

• Pages load up to 45% faster across all browsers
• Customizes optimization rules for their highly regulated business
• Mitigates the impact of ever-growing pages
• Complements other performance solutions (DSA and in-house performance engineering)
  
  

"Site Optimizer does exactly what it says it does," says Mr. Smalling. "It optimizes for every single browser and operating system. It's a great feeling to invest in a solution that actually delivers on its promise."

Next...

Read the full case study:
Wine.com accelerates load times by up to 45% across all browsers

Learn more about the Strangeloop Site Optimizer: 
Discover how it can make your pages faster -- automatically.

Contact a Strangeloop Performance Expert: 
Get answers to all your web and application performance questions.

Latency: What you don't know can hurt your website's performance

Here's a latency reality check: Most site owners assume their pages experience latency of 20-30ms, but recent analysis of 3 million unique users indicates that the number could be at least four times worse.

Not sure what latency is? 

In web performance circles, "latency" is the amount of time it takes for the host server to receive and process a request for a page object. The amount of latency depends largely on how far away the user is from the server.

To put this in real-world terms, say you visit a web page and that page contains 100 objects — things like images, CSS files, etc. Your browser has to make 100 individual requests to the site’s host server(s) in order to retrieve those objects. Each of those requests experiences at least 20-30ms of latency. This adds up to 2 or 3 seconds, which is pretty significant when you consider it as just one factor that can slow your pages down. (To understand latency further, check out this latency primer written by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby.)

Early findings show that desktop latency ranges from 65ms to 145ms.

Last month, we conducted a survey to identify typical latency for mobile users versus desktop users. The results were surprising. While we expected mobile latency to be high (last fall, some ad hoc research led to the realization that latency can hit 350ms on 3G), we also expected latency for desktop users to be relatively low — and this was not the case.

Our findings, which were recently picked up by GigaOM, included:

1. Desktop latency was worse than expected.

Median desktop latency ranged from 65ms to 145ms. Most site owners tend to estimate their latency numbers in the 20-30ms range. If you do this, these findings should give you pause.

2. Median mobile latency was between 26% to 96% poorer than desktop.

There has been a spate of reports lately citing the fact that mobile users are using devices over their wifi connections at home. As a result, some site owners are relaxing their concerns over mobile performance. However, median latency of 190ms is a serious performance issue.

3. The CDN you pick matters.

Further to the above, the CDN you choose makes a big difference. Each of the sites we measured is on a different CDN, and desktop latency was almost doubled from one site to another.

4. Outliers for mobile had double the latency of desktop outliers.

Individually, outliers aren’t hugely significant, but in our study, the tail of mobile outliers represents a large number of people who are experiencing painful latency – up to 990ms. That’s almost a full second for every page resource. 

5. Mobile traffic accounted for about 10% of total traffic.

As an interesting aside, we found this number held across all three sites. Note that these were mobile users who were visiting the full site, not an m.site.

For a more detailed account of our findings, read this post by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby: Latency reality check: Early findings show that desktop latency ranges from 65-145ms

How Strangeloop tackles latency

Our Site Optimizer and Mobile Optimizer solutions alleviate latency in three key ways:

1. Consolidate page objects into bundles. Fewer bundles means fewer trips to the server, so the total latency hit is greatly reduced. For example, a page that starts with 63 objects could see those objects consolidated into 9 resource requests.
2. Leverage the browser cache. Our solutions allow the cache to do a more efficient job of storing files and serving them again where relevant, so that the browser doesn’t have to make repeat calls to the server.
3. Allow more page requests to happen concurrently. We leverage Google's SPDY protocol, which extends what the browser can do by adding a session layer atop of SSL that allows for multiple concurrent streams over a single connection.

Questions about latency and web performance?

We have the answers. Take a moment to book your phone meeting with one of our Performance Experts.