ProjectX Blog

Xlinks is a digest of interesting links from internet that ProjectX staff have found in the last week.

Atomisation of Conversations
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:40AM
20 ways to fix Google Analytics
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:38AM

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Yahoo and Microsoft back at the table
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:36AM

UK Shops secretly track shopping habits by mobile phone
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:35AM

Facebook chat powered by Erlang – scales to 70 million users
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:13AM

YAWS vs Apache – performance test
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:12AM

YAWS – Yet another webserver
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:12AM

Performance Testing Data Delivery Techniques for AJAX PDF
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:11AM

Why Generation Y is going to change the web
Added on 05/16/2008 at 10:35AM

Web performance – Splitting your payload:

There is more push to make your javascript load on demand
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:40AM

Firefly – chat with people on the same site
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:30AM

Shuttleworth calls for co-ordinated release cycles
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:28AM

Google releases Flash API for maps
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:26AM

GPS crimefighting in US
Added on 05/15/2008 at 12:50PM

Nokia sees half of cellphones with GPS
Added on 05/15/2008 at 12:49PM

Build your own fonts
Added on 05/14/2008 at 12:34PM

Can you catch up on lost sleep
Added on 05/13/2008 at 03:38PM

Cuzillion – Shows how webpage performance is affected by script loading
Added on 05/13/2008 at 12:20PM

High performance websites part 2 book coming soon
Added on 05/13/2008 at 12:04PM

Teaching Kids Programming by Nat Torkington
Added on 05/13/2008 at 12:02PM

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

This post is Part of a web performance audit of New Zealand homepages. (Part II looks at Government homepages.)

I’ve compiled a list called the New Zealand homepage hall of shame. The list details the download efficiency of the top 75 websites in New Zealand. The survey was conducted using the YSlow tool over the top 75 New Zealand websites from Rankr.

In the results, I’ve included the YSlow ranking, total size of the webpage (this includes all html, css, flash, javascript, images etc) in Kilobytes, the number of external javascpript and CSS files and the time it would take to load on a 56k Modem (@ 6k/s).

The Highlights lowlights of the survey:

• The average size of homepages was 304.9K. UPDATE: Global webpage Average is 312K
• 52% of websites use NO WEB COMPRESSION
• The largest pages were over 1000K
• Several of the top 20 sites in New Zealand were the biggest offenders
• Advertising javascript is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 35 javascript files
  

A number of web companies and web developers should be holding their heads in shame – the results are not flattering. We need to better building smart – download friendly webpages not slow loading monsters ! You can either fix it yourself or get some experts!

So without further a due here are the summary tables:

Top 10 worst homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 best homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 largest homepages in Kilobytes

Top 10 smallest homepages in Kilobytes

Here is the complete data for the top 75 New Zealand websites homepages. I have compiled the list from using YSlow to analyse the pages and recording everything. The data is sorted by worst Yslow ranking. (The test was completed 13th of May 2008 between 8-10pm)

I been working on a mini audit of the top 75 New Zealand websites. I took the top 75 NZ websites from Rankr and using YSlow compiled the data last night.

I discovered that …

The Average homepage size in NZ is 304.9K !

That will take almost 51 seconds to load on a modem.

The size is the total downloaded size of all the total html, css, images, js, flash etc. Compressed files are recorded at their compressed size.

Even more scary is 52% of the top NZ website are not using any web compression, 37.3% are using some compression and 10.7% are fully compressed.

We can’t complain about dial up loading speed if our homepages are over 300K!

I’ll be posting the NZ homepages of shame, very shortly.

UPDATE: Global average pagesize is 312K

I’ve just been reviewing some of the recent materials by Steve Souders (previously of Yahoo, now at Google) on speeding up your javascript. He has powerpoint slides (from Web expo 2.0) on how you can load scripts in parallel and how to structure the loading of your scripts.

The powerpoint is a must for any web developer who wants to ensure their website can deliver high performance.

He reminds us that 91% of the time spent waiting for a webpage to render is spent on the the frontend. The frontend covers loading all of the CSS, javascript and images loading. The other 9% covers the request to the server and loading the base html!

This highlights the some focus on the frontend can make a huge difference in speeding up webpages.

Other resources:

• Best practices for web performance
• YSlow
• IBM page detailer to look at a page is loading.
• Youtube webcast part 1 and oreilly webcast part 2
  
• Cuzillion – Steve’s opensource tool to demonstrate how different page components affect page loading

We have no new Rankr stats this week. For the second time in a couple of weeks, the Alexa data for New Zealand has not updated. The problem has been logged with Alexa (Amazon) and we will update the data as soon as it comes available.

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JSON – The Fat free alternative to XML
Added on 05/12/2008 at 04:29PM
Processing visualisation language in javascript
Added on 05/12/2008 at 01:44PM

Google’s street view meets resistance in France
Added on 05/12/2008 at 01:43PM

‘Back to Mac’ catches a thief

Smile – Youve just be photod with a stolen laptop
Added on 05/12/2008 at 01:27PM

Gmail as an open relay spam server

Crap
Added on 05/12/2008 at 01:25PM

Rescue Time aggregated data
Added on 05/12/2008 at 12:58PM

Old java sorting algorithm demos
Added on 05/12/2008 at 12:57PM

Entrepreneurial Proverbs
Added on 05/12/2008 at 12:50PM

Unobtrusive Javascript with jQuery
Added on 05/08/2008 at 11:32AM

The art of testing web applications
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:39PM

Larry Page on how to change the world
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:38PM

How to explain RSS to normal people
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:19PM

What postgres can learn from MySQL
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:17PM

Malcolm Gladwell: Who says big ideas are rare
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:16PM

Joel Spolsky: Architecture astronauts
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:16PM

Vi editor written in javascript: Why??????
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:13PM

How little do users read on a webpage
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:05PM

Mongrel-esi – For those you want to push caching out to CDN’s
Added on 05/07/2008 at 05:03PM

Buttons Padding
Added on 05/07/2008 at 03:54PM

Firefox has 30 share in Oceania
Added on 05/07/2008 at 10:26AM