Web Performance Digest: September 2012 - Third-party outages, new-and-improved tools, and impatience as digital virtue
Contributed by Tammy Everts.
At the beginning of each month, we update our Web Performance Hub with a collection of the most compelling articles, posts, videos, and presentations from around the web performance community.
This month's Web Performance Digest features a handful of great new links. Learn why "unoccupied waiting" is so torturous, get a full report on why webpages are 9% slower in 2012, and find out why page size matters even more for mobile apps.
Big ideas
Why waiting is torture
The New York Times
Ever wondered why elevators have mirrors? This fascinating New York Times article explains why, compares occupied versus unoccupied wait times, and concludes that the human experience of waiting is defined only partly by the "objective length" of the wait.
Impatience as digital virtue
Huffington Post
Apple promotes Siri as a digital assistant to schedule our lives and answer our questions, but what does it ask for in return? According to this article, a total redesign of our social sensibilities.
Why CIOs are quickly prioritizing analytics, cloud and mobile
Forbes.com
Shrewd consumers are a byproduct of the digital age. As customers reinvent how they learn about new products, the best-run companies aren't just acknowledging these newly empowered consumers, they're embracing them.
Better tools
Improving site performance with Yslow
New Relic
YSlow is a tool that helps site owners analyze the performance of a website based on 23 best practices. It’s available as a plugin for all major browsers except Internet Explorer, and offers great insight on real world performance. This tutorial is a great introduction for anyone using YSlow for the first time, or for those who want to learn to use it better.
Steve Souders’ browser clear test
Steve Souders
Ever wonder how much is actually deleted when you "clear" your browser data? This tool by Google performance guru Steve Souders lets you know.
Configuring an ‘all-in-one’ WebPageTest Private Instance
Andy Davies
Using WebPagetest to test a private instance – i.e. a site that isn’t publicly accessible – is reasonably straightforward save for a few small differences. Self-described web performance geek Andy Davies walks us through the process.
Research and analysis
Third-party issues and the performance ripple effect
dynaTrace
When Internet Registry and DNS provider GoDaddy experienced a major outage on September 10th, a large number of major US sites experienced little to no performance impact. How could this be? This post breaks down how maintaining DNS control kept them in the clear.
State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance [Fall 2012]
Strangeloop
When Strangeloop began tracking the performance of 2,000 top ecommerce sites in 2010, we never expected to see pages actually getting slower. But despite faster browsers and devices, that’s exactly what’s happening. Follow this link to download the free report.
Why page size matters even more for mobile web apps
dynaTrace
Mobile web applications have many limitations, and the end-user experience can easily be damaged when these limitations are forgotten. This excellent post outlines why page size matters even more for mobile apps.
Check out the rest of the Hub for hundreds more links to the best selection of performance-related resources on the web.
