Speed of a Website
SmugMug founder Don MacAskill recently wrote about the need for speed in his application space. Specifically, he took some stats from the Alexa tool from Amazon.com.According to Alexa's own Speed Test, Alexa aggregates data from all of their users who have their toolbar installed on their machines. But I'm not sure how they decided that SmugMug takes (on average) 0.9 seconds to load. Perhaps an explanation is in order.
According to WebSiteOptimization.com (a tool we use quite often), SmugMug's index page is 351K and it would take someone on a T1 about 6.26 seconds to load. Which means that if Alexa's load time is 0.9 seconds, the average Alexa user who visits SmugMug.com would be (6.26 seconds / 0.9 seconds) = 6.95 times faster than a T1 connection. Since a T1 is 1.44 Mbps download that would be 10.08 Mbps down!!
Using those same numbers for our restaurant / hospitality employee scheduling product TimeForge (which is about to get a massive update on both the website and the application) we get some great load times! TimeForge is 171K in size (our next update should reduce the size by another 40K!), and should be loaded by a T1 in about 4.11 seconds. Assuming that our average user has a 10Mbps connection (like SmugMug!), our load time is 0.59 seconds!
As for the 10Mbps? Don pointed out - statistics are best in relation to other statistics, and doing some digging on our competition would probably be the best relation for the Alexa stats.
1 Comments:
If you want to get it snappier still, pay attention to cache-control headers (ie. setting etags) which will you'll thank yourself for later if you throw in a caching tier. (Mix in mod_deflate and a reasonable sndbuf in your Apache conf's for some other cheap gains).
--green
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