26Aug 10
Russell Luke of our UK distributor Application Performance was interviewed today by WindowsITPro. Russell talks about how long users are happy to wait for web pages to load before they begin to get frustrated - the bottom line is that faster sites make for happier users, more productive businesses and greater revenue.
“Regardless of whether you are using SharePoint for internet, intranet or extranet applications,
the need for speed has never been greater.”
Russell has used Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator to increase the page load speed of UK companies such as RM Education and PZ Cussons with fantastic acceleration results.
>> Read more about Russell’s experience of speeding up large SharePoint websites.
About
Russell Luke is Managing Director and co-founder of Application Performance and has worked in the application performance management area for over 12 years.
You can get in touch with Russell at russell.luke@applicationperformance.com
14Jul 10
A faster SharePoint website increases revenue, decreases costs, improves user experience and productivity, drives more traffic to your site.
Having the fastest quad core server, gigabytes of memory and solid state disks, does not guarantee fast access to websites from the user’s perspective - So why are SharePoint and other websites so slow?
In this webinar we will walk through:
- What makes web pages slow to load
- Free performance measurement tools
- How to improve your performance results instantly
We will also show you how the Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator improves performance for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 based websites and intranets.
Date: Thursday, July 29, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
11Jul 10
Congratulations to Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders, Jessie Robbins, May, Yvonne and the rest of the team at O’Reilly.
This year’s Velocity web performance and operations conference was the most successful yet – and it’s great to see the continued enthusiasm, innovation and growth within the industry.
For those of you who didn’t make the conference, or like us were too busy in the exhibition hall, you can see the session videos here.
My favorite – John Rauser from Amazon on Creating Cultural Change
2Jun 10
Wireshark is the must have tool used by network IT professionals to troubleshoot, 
secure and optimize networks. Rated #2 in the Top 100 Network Security Tools by sectools.org Wireshark is the world's most popular network analyzer. So when Laura Chappell authored the ultimate resource book on Wireshark - Wireshark Network Analysis: The Official Wireshark Certified Network Analyst Study Guide - and included a case study on Aptimize we felt pretty honoured.
In Chapter 8: Interpret Basic Trace File Statistics Laura provides step-by-step procedures for application analysis methods to determine if an application affected network browsing performance using an analysis of Aptimize Website Accelerator running on Microsoft's Sharepoint and graphing methods to illustrate the effect of this tuning product. Laura then used Wireshark to show exactly how Aptimize Website Accelerator altered the traffic flow and increased performance.
"What a dream! As I delved into the packets I could see exactly
how Aptimize Website Accelerator dramatically improved website
loading times and significantly reduced overhead on the network."
Laura Chappell
In the other chapters of the book readers learn to capture wired and wireless traffic, focus on the cause of slow web browsing, identify why applications don't run properly across the network, locate the cause of poor VoIP call quality, determine why WLANs are plagued with problems and more.
The author, Laura Chappell is the founder of Wireshark University and Chappell University and has been analyzing networks for over 20 years. The foreword was written by Gerald Combs, creator of Wireshark.
>> Find out more about the book
>> Table of contents
>> Buy the book
20May 10
This month we published two 2010 Website Performance Benchmark whitepapers. This research is based on measuring the load times of all the Fortune 500 (USA) and FTSE 350 (UK) companies and compiling a set of performance benchmarks that all websites should use.
We measured the homepage of each website using four performance benchmarks:
- First view load time (domestic)
- First view load time (international)
- Repeat view load time
- Start render time
The load times are real world “end user load times” i.e. how long it takes to load a page from the time a user enters an URL in their browser to when the page displays in the browser.
Methodology
To obtain these results, we used WebPageTest.org – a free online tool that accurately measures load times by using Internet Explorer 7 on a dedicated machine from locations around the world to load the webpage and measure load times to “document complete” – where all the page elements are loaded, but before any flash animations begin.
We performed tests measuring load times from Dulles VA USA; Wellington, New Zealand and Gloucester UK, the global load times are an average of the test results from the three locations.
Results
Fortune 500 - 2010 Website Performance Benchmarks
Fortune 500 - Results data
Fortune 500 - Infographic
FTSE 350 - 2010 Website Performance Benchmarks
FTSE 350 - Results data
FTSE 350 - Infographic
How they compare
- Overall global load times are almost identical: UK:9.592, USA 9.462
- The UK domestic load times are faster: UK 5.545, USA 7.066
- UK start render times are 29% slower UK 3.817, USA 2.960
- UK domestic repeat view load times are 25% slower: UK: 4.947 USA: 3.970
- Overall, the USA websites are richer – 19% more content and 17% more HTTP requests
