Blog Post

Top Ten Web Performance Insights for 2011

As we are closing 2011, take a look at our most popular and insightful blog posts

As we are closing 2011, take a look at our most popular and insightful blog posts:

A New Blind Spot for Web Performance Tools (03/02/2011): We cover a new monitoring blind spot with Internet Explorer tools when measuring iframe response time.  If a JavaScript is executed right after iframe request starts then IE might include the JavaScript execution time in the iframe response time.  This causes misleading data that incorrectly suggests the server for the iframe URL is responding slowly, when in fact is not.

Relying on Web Performance Monitoring to Discover Release Problems (03/25/2011): A case study on how the performance of a popular website (Top 20 Internet Retailer site) severely degrades following the roll out of a new release.  The Catchpoint monitoring tool discovers the cause relying on a jump of number of connections.

My 2 cents on the AWS failure and lessons learned from the past – (04/25/2011): Our CEO Mehdi Daoudi gives his perspective on the Amazon Cloud failure. Failures are bound to happen no matter what.  Always have a backup plan and test it, do not rely on a single vendor for an all-in-one solution, monitor your third party vendors, and know their backup plans.

Royal Wedding & The Internet… (04/29/2011): Catchpoint monitors News Outlets, Social Media websites, and other related websites during the Royal Wedding.  Data reveals BBC, Yahoo, Youtube, and Facebook all having performance issues due to the high load.

Three Key Steps to Successful Web Performance Benchmarking (05/26/2011): To successfully benchmark performance against competitors, know your goals, where to look for insightful data, and how to test it.

Getting the Most Out of Performance Monitoring: Setting Alert Thresholds (07/04/2011): When setting up alerts, looking a site’s average performance doesn’t provide enough clarity to set a meaningful threshold.  Other statistical values, like the 95% percentile, will give you more transparency of your site’s normal performance and allow you to set an appropriate threshold.

Free DNS Can Hurt Web Performance (10/05/2011): DNS resolution is the first step in reaching a unique server on a domain and also is the first place for your performance to be affected.  Price and quality are hand-in-hand and that’s true for Managed DNS service too, therefore choose your DNS service carefully!

Webpages turning into Airports without Traffic Controller (10/10/2011): Too many third party tags are appearing on webpages with not enough regard to how they impact performance to the end user.

Web Performance Optimization Resolution for 2012 (12/19/2011): Two of the most effective and easiest to implement  WPO techniques were under utilized in 2011 – HTTP Compression and Persistent HTTP Connections (Keep Alive).  Please make it a resolution to implement them for 2012!

The Biggest Misconception about Google Page Speed (12/27/2011): Google Page Speed Score is a reflection of how well your website follows standard WPO techniques to speed up performance on the front end.  It is not correlative to your actual speed as it doesn’t consider many backend/infrastructure practices as well as how many bytes of data are actually being sent to the end user.

We look forward to 2012 and another year of web performance revelations.  Happy New Year!

Catchpoint Team

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