ProjectX Blog

Om Malik has just wrote a post about broadband usage in London. In London there are a numer of providers and they have quality services for WI-FI, Broadband and 3G. Here’s the full report from Ofcom .

In London:

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* 40 percent of people watch TV or video content online.
* 20 percent make VoIP calls.
* 32 percent are using their mobile phones to access the Internet.
* 19 percent listen to audio content on their mobiles.

The evidence is mounting better broadband and mobile services will result in more usage and more opportunities for companies / content providers to create new revenue streams. Let’s hope things will change for the better this decade!

Google has just released the AJAX Libraries API. Google has created an API that allows developers to access a number of popular javascript API from the Google Cloud.

You can use the Google AJAX Libraries API to reference:

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• Prototype
• JQuery
• MooTools
• Scriptalous
• Dojo

Why is this good idea ?

1. Its Fast – its hosted on the Google CDN.
2. The libraries have already been optomised ie. minified, delivered via compression
3. It enables better caching of key libraries from one site to another. ie. Visit site A that uses mootools it downloads the javascript. Visit site b that uses mootools and it fetches it from the cache.

How do I use it ?

Its really easy to use. Either call the scripts directly eg.

<script src=“http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js”></script>

or use the Google API to load them scripts.

<script src=“http://www.google.com/jsapi”></script>

<script>

// Load jQuery

google.load(“jquery”, “1”);

A couple of requests to Google

The AJAX Library API is a fantastic idea, but it could be better. We have a couple of requests 🙂 .

1. can you host more of the legacy versions of the libraries. (We use an old version of prototype. The recent versions are a little bloat for what we need).
2. It would great if you could provide stats on how many sites in a particular country are using the libraries. Then we can see if there are other sites in that are using the same libraries and then we get the benefit of caching 🙂
3. Properly minify the scripts! Thanks for to Eric for pointing it out.
4. Fix the Website. The FAQ and Groups links are going to the wrong place !

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What is parallel downloading?

In order to explain what parallel downloading is we first have to illustrate how a webage is rendered by a browser. When you type in the URL and press enter, the browser looks up the DNS for the site, connects to the webserver and requests the base HTML of the site. The browser downloads the file and then starts to parse the HTML. The browser starts to queue up the components of the page it needs to load and then finally begins to render the page.

If the webpage and web server are set-up properly, the browser will seek to download the various components in parallel. ie. it can load multiple components at the same time. Unfortunately, javascript and CSS files can block other components from being downloaded until the files are fully loaded. This blocking behaviour can make a huge impact on a users experience in downloading the page. This blocking behaviour is illustrated below.

Why do want my site to load in parallel ?

The major objective of website optimisation is to minimise the time spent downloading a webpage. One way to achieve this is to load as many components as possible in parallel. (without comprising performance!) The HTTP/1.1 Spec defines that browsers can download two files in parallel from a hostname.

As we move more towards the broadband era, we want to promote more parallel downloading to speed up the delivery of our web content.

Examples:

Below I have included the download profile using IE 6.5 of two New Zealand websites to illustrate why parallel downloading is important.

Good – Parallel downloading

Here you can see the download profile of Trade Me Homepage. You can see that the images load in chunks of 4 at a time. This illustrates how you can much you speed up the loading of your page components.

Bad – Sequential downloading

Here you can see the download profile of Sky City Cinema Homepage. Notice the stepping behaviour of the javascript files loading. The javascript files are loading in single file, one after the other – NOT in parallel. You can see from this behaviour that the loading of the script files is blocking the rest of the content such as images from loading. This explains the delay on the page before the user starts to see the rest of the content.

How did I get my site to load in parallel?

1. Analyse your current downloading pattern. Use Firebug or SiteTimer to show you how your page is loading. Look for what is loading in parallel and what is loading sequentially.
2. Minimise the number of blocking files ie Javascript and CSS. When possible combine and use web compression to speed up loading of the site.
3. Split your page components across multiple domains. ie. One for images, one for ad components. TIP: Create a domain alias for your site eg. for all your images eg. images.blah.com. The browser treats this as a new domain even though its referencing the same webserver.
   Example: For ZoomIn maps – we use 4 domains for the map images, that means for a broadband connection the browser can load upto 8 images at a time.

Note: YSlow research shows that a total of 2-4 domains per page is optimal.

Resources:

• FireBug
• SiteTimer
• YSlow
• Yahoo Performance Blog

I’ve just completed a mini audit of the total size of the frontend vs backend requests of the top 75 NZ homepages

The average backend request size is 27.32K (ie. the size of the base html of page) and that equates to an average of 10.65% of total page size. What this means that is 10.65% of the pages is made up of HTML and the other 89.35% of the page is made up with the other content.

What does this mean and why is it important?

A backend request is the base html of the page. The frontend requests are all subsequent requests to load all css, images, javascript etc of the page. As you can see in the above graphic of the download profile of ZoomIn Homepage , you can see that the base HTML is loaded first and then other components of the page (ie. CSS, javascript and images) are loaded after the base HTML

This behaviour is a really important aspect of web compression as the faster you can load the backend html, the faster the rest of your site will start loading and more importantly the faster your users can start using the site.

Why does web performance matter????

Google has announced that it will start adding page load times into formula for ad ranking. They say that it may have an effect on your keyword score.

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Here’s what Google says about why they are making the change.

Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

There is more information at the adwords help center.

This part II of my audit of New Zealand Homepages (Part I looked at the top 75 homepages in New Zealand).

I have conduct an audit of 320 Government websites looking at their web performance. The audit was conducted by using YSlow to analyse the download performance of the homepage of a Government website. The list of government websites was taken from the New Zealand Government website. Full results are available from this Google Spreadsheet. Audit conducted on Tuesday Night 20th May 2008.

Audit Findings

Homepage Size

Graph of NZ Government Home page sizes

(Click on the graph to view values)

• The average homepage size was 216.85K (Compared to 304.5K for top 75 NZ websites) The largest Homepage was staggering 2442K and the smallest homepage was 8.3K,

Web Compression

Graph of Web compression usage on Government webpages

• 84.1% of Government homepages were not compressed, 11.6% are compressing some of the page elements and only 4.4% (14 sites) are fully compressing their pages.
• Some sites are compressing only CSS and JS files but NOT their base HTML
• A lot of sites have compression external javascript eg. Google Analytics (which was discounted as being part of the site) This highlights that all external javascript should be compressed.

Other findings

• The worst site had 151 files for their homepage and the best site 3 files
• The worst offending pages had over 21 Javscript files and the worst offender for the number of CSS files was 40.
• Some sites have duplicate versions of scripts running. One site had 4 Google analytic scripts running.

Tables

Top 10 best Government homepages ranked by YSlow

Top 10 worst Government homepages ranked by YSlow

Top 10 smallest Government homepages by size

Top 10 largest Government homepages by size

My post on NZ Homepage Hall of Shame has shaken things up. I’ve had a number of emails and comments on the blog. A number of sites are now actively looking at improving their page architecture.

Update: A proposal to add web compression to the e-govt webstandard ! Great news.

Kudo’s to New Zealand Herald and Vodafone for taking action and improving their pages. Their numbers now are:

I’ll be doing another audit soon to profile the rest of the sites.

In the we still haven’t learnt from our past mistakes files…

Just saw this post Software takes you to infinity and beyond on stuff. I thought that the worldwide telescope looks awesome and proceeding to download it. I thought to myself I’ll get my mother in law to install it for her grandchildren in India. And then I got to the download page and here’s what I found.

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6 steps with dependencies and warnings about turning off security. There’s no way I can get my mother in law to install it. Its too complicated and too painful!

If you’re going to release software aimed at families and children then it needs to be easy to install!

I’ve just found this article about global pages sizes, its confirms some of the figures that I posted about the average size of homepages in New Zealand.

It seems that we are below the global average of 312K. The scary thing is that its grown from a 93K average in 2003! And the number of external files (JS, CSS, images) for a webpage has nearly doubled.

From the article.

“So the increase in the average speed of broadband has more than kept pace with the increase in the size and complexity of the average web page. That is one reason why broadband users expect faster response times. Yet narrowband users have experienced slower response times as web page size has increased.”

The article has some good info on, growth of media files, image sizes and average web page characteristics.

I’ve recently conducted a survey of the top 75 websites in New Zealand called the New Zealand Homepage hall of shame.

We’ve realised there is a lack of knowledge out there when it comes to make websites faster. Starting today, I’d like to annoucement that Paul Gold (ProjectX and Auric Consulting ) and I (John Clegg) will be available on a consulting basis to help companies improve their website and systems performance.

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We’ve been working in a number of ecommerce companies for almost 10 years and we’re surprised at the lack of understanding of basic web and database optimisation. We given a couple of talks at WDANZ, Summer of Code and eGovt Barcamp over the past 12 months and it seems that the message is still not getting through.

Why does it matter?

“We see a direct correlation between the speed of our services and our bottom line.

Our customers seem inclined to spend a set time on our site per session – the more pages they can few in that time, the more they see and buy, and the more we earn.”

– John MacDonald – CEO Trade Me 2007

Speed is very important in your customers experience. Its time that we maximise that experience.

Our Goal

We specialise in helping businesses build and run fast scalable systems.

What we do:

• Focus on helping businesses achieve their objectives – We help businesses tame your technology to meet your business objectives.

• Maximise web & transactional throughput – We focus on maximising the speed of the system to increase customer engagement.

• Analysis of web, database and hardware bottlenecks – We are experience at locating and isolating a wide variety bottlenecks

• Minimise Technology footprint – We concentrate on getting the most of your existing hardware and technology.

• Provide cost-effective solutions – We work with our customers to find solutions for their budget.

• Leverage the best technologies for best results – We use a range of open source and commercial technologies to achieve the objectives.

• Research high performance technologies – We research and test a number of technologies to find the best solution for projects. We have spent a lot of time researching memory caching, Web proxies and high volume web delivery technologies.

We are:

• Experienced web, database and infrastructure specialists – We have over combined 20+ years of commercial experience in building and running technology.

• Experienced in scaling modern websites – We have been involved in building scalable website that include the latest AJAX technology

• Experienced in Unix and Windows – We have strong commercial experience over all flavours of Unix and Windows.

• Vendor neutral – We are focused on finding a solution, and will utilise existing technology to meet those needs.

Our Experience:

Our the past 10 years, we helped a number of websites perform and scale to meet their customers needs

• ProjectX
• Trade Me
• Bidorbuy.com / Baazee.com (now eBay India)
• Fatsa.gr
• QXL.com