Crescendo's Web Application Performance Blog

So, when you bring a new product to a guy that works for ACME Corp., your product doesn't only need to work, it also needs to help him get a raise. And if your product doesn't include easy-to-use management tools, and most importantly, a reporting capability that is easy for the brass to understand, your champion may like it, but he will have a very hard time selling it internally. And, he will have fewer reasons to try. After all, this doesn't get him noticed in the way he wants as they will see him as a geek trying to push a toy with unclear benefits, high risk and an unbudgeted-for price-tag.

And another thing: after the POC and the vendor-sponsored lunches are over, your prospect is left to work with your product, every day. And if it's too hard and unfriendly it will quickly overshadow the less "tangible" benefits such as performance and security.

This is why most new product first clients are early adopters, with decision-makers that are usually very technical, less risk-averse and more price-conscious. And this is why it is so difficult to hook the "big ones" - the blue-chip names where decisions are made using different criteria, and where the reasons I mentioned above are all too important to ignore.

And this is why I am so excited about our new product, AppBeat SC. It does just that - makes our core ADC product benefits easier to visualize and demonstrate. It will help our users perform their day-to-day tasks easier while being able to clearly show the benefit AppBeat DC is bringing to the company including how much bandwidth is saved, how much work is offloaded from the servers, how many new servers you can avoid buying thanks to Crescendo, and so forth. But more importantly, it will, for the first time, expose business-related information that will make decision-making easier. For example, how is your traffic distributed among your different web properties? What are your peak times? Is there a pattern? How many new users did you have this last week? How fast is your website during those peak loads?

This will be a decision-support tool, first and foremost. For our customers and prospects, the ability to not only "feel" but to actually "see" and "show" the advantages of Crescendo will be priceless.

We outsource a great deal of our manufacturing, done by subcontractors who specialize in manufacturing electronic products. This week, I and a group of our developers went up north to visit 2 manufacturing contractors and got a tour of their manufacturing facilities. We were literally blown away. The technology behind the manufacturing process is amazing.

The first was Flextronics. They have 16 automated lines that start out with an empty printed circuit board, then automatically insert and place all the components on it, solder them to the board while automatically running quality checks. Subsequently the boards get assembled into a finished product in specially made manufacturing cells. The whole process is highly automated and is constantly going through Kaizen improvement cycles. The efficiencies of the manufacturing line are incredible and due to the Kaizen processes are on an infinite improvement path. The system spits out a finished circuit board at a rate of about 1 per 25 seconds and is intelligent enough to stop the whole line when a quality problem is discovered, and before additional boards get ruined.

From Flextronics, we went back to an earlier phase of the manufacturing process to a sub contractor that manufactures complex circuit boards. For me, especially coming from a background in computer science, a circuit board always seemed like just an epoxy board with a bunch of copper lines and connectors on it. Boy, was I wrong.

Each board has multiple planes of conductors, 50 microns thick, separated from each other by insulating layers of epoxy embedded with glass fibers. A modern printed circuit could have up to 32 different layers which are interconnected through specially drilled and copper plated holes in particular areas on the board. A board is slowly built layer by layer, compressed together and calibrated in special machines. A complex board could go through hundreds of steps until completion, involving photographical methods, chemistry, laser drilling, pressure treating and more. The whole process from start to finish could take up to 2 weeks to complete. Amazing.

To finish up on a very interesting day, we closed the day having a late lunch at a great steak house. I will not go into the manufacturing process there :-)

At AlertSite®, they can help you make sure that your Web pages continue to scale well under heavy user traffic. Adding new Internet applications, launching a marketing campaign or revamping your user interface, adds some stress to your Web-based systems. Their On-Demand Web Load Testing service enables you to conduct Web load tests anytime, while making sure that your Web site and Internet applications are always ready for maximum user demand.

In addition, they offer DéjàClick^TM, an inside-the-browser Web performance monitoring system. It automatically builds testing scripts by following users' click streams. The resulting scripts can test and monitor Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which have become the backbone of Web commerce.

Remember, traffic spikes are "happy times" - be sure you have the right tools and application delivery in place to ensure predictability and optimal end-user experience!

I believe that a lot of good comes from the Open Source movement. Quality software, thorough peer review and community based standards are just a few of the benefits.

Here at Crescendo we develop some really cool code - and the coolest code is in our FPGA's. One of our general purpose code blocks allows storage of variable length packet in a fixed size memory buffer based on a linked list of fixed size chunks. It's the basis for temporary packet storage that is flexible, compact and extremely efficient.

This week we uploaded this code module to OpenCores.org - one of the Internet's largest repositories of open source hardware designs. Consider it our small contribution to the open source world, hopefully the first of many.

Direct link to Open Free List project

I read this article last week and was anxious to see the full report that published yesterday (Feb 2). Survey Finds Online Shoppers Have Experienced More Web Site Performance Problems During Peak Shopping Periods

One third of consumers that Gomez surveyed* said they had a bad experience with a retail web site during the past holiday season. This caused one in five online shoppers to go to a competitor to spend their hard earned money. End users demand a good experience independent if you are experiencing peak loads. More visitors means more business, right? Isn't that the point?

Here are a couple key findings I felt were most compelling:

1) During peak traffic loads, 72% experienced slower web sites more frequently.

2) Poor experiences during peak traffic times directly impact business results - 78% went to a competitive site due to poor performance. 88% never return.

So, what are you doing to ensure predictability and optimal web load times?

*Gomez.com white paper report - When more Website visitors hurt your business: Are you ready for peak traffic?

So back to my marketing question for this year - "Are companies and end-users more tolerant when it comes to web site performance today?"

I realize there are many factors involved with running a popular web site. I also know things get complicated when you examine analytics to determine how each factor relates to revenue. I am not speaking about the usability of a site. I am talking pure performance - the ability for the site to do what it is intended to do within a reasonable and acceptable time period for the person with fingers on the keyboard and shiny credit card sitting close by.

Bojan Simic, Founder of TRAC Research, posted a blog yesterday called "How PowerPoint fell in love with aligning IT with business" - and the struggles that  IT professionals must work out to find the perfect metrics and tools to fully understand how to align performance and revenue (some call it business goals, but heck, we all know revenue is the only thing that really matters).

How much insight do IT folks truly have at the web tier of their business? Can they see that pending requests may have never made it to the other side?  Is there an addressable market ready to convert if they had better connection management? Are the servers over burdened with I/O and CPU intensive tasks? 

Here at Crescendo, we offer an appliance that optimizes and accelerates web traffic so your site can handle ANY load, ANY traffic spike and for those that care - it even improves the end user experience. 

In addition, we offer AppBeat SC, which allows deep insight, monitoring and alerting to your network. We can make the life of an IT administrator easier and allow them to gather stats in a flash.

The message surrounding "availability" may have hits its popularity during the early load balancing days (90s)- but it remains core to every web business on the planet.  Every web site exists to perform a function - and if it's not performant and predictable - well, neither is your online business.

According to Gartner's key IT predictions for 2010 and beyond, issued last week, as many as 20% of businesses will rely solely on cloud computing.  Here's the verbatim prediction:

"By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets." 

You might take issue with the 20% figure, the timeframe, or the 'no IT assets' part of the prediction. However, it's safe to say:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will continue to replace on-premise software in many businesses.
  
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or cloudware will gain acceptance for businesses developing their own applications.

Web application performance will be absolutely critical for the vendors competing for that SaaS and PaaS business. And the growth in these cloud-based, multi-tenant data centers will push us to develop new and innovative ways to accelerate application performance for massive traffic volumes and low latency.

It's an exciting time to be in the application delivery controller market, because we think the ADC will play a critical role in the cloud-based infrastructure. It's essential to optimizing performance to the end user and scaling up web applications. We're constantly developing new features to support the demands of cloud computing providers - most recently, virtual ADC partitioning and elastic resource control.

So, while the IT world is moving the clouds, we'll keep working to build the next-generation hardware-based technologies to support it. 

iPhones or Android - whichever smart phone wins, one thing is sure. By the end of 2010, there will be more users accessing applications from mobile browsers than today. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will have handsets capable of rich mobile commerce. (See Gartner's Top Ten Strategic Technologies for 2010.) That's a really big market.

What does this mean for your application? Time to optimize for mobile.

Obviously, you should look at optimizing application functions and web design for delivery to mobile handsets - stripping out flash and reducing text, for example.

But once you've worked around design, performance is a key factor. The data networks these phones use aren't as fast as users expect. Performance is probably the #1 frustration for mobile users accessing web applications.

Data compression is essential - by sending less data to the client, you're actually accelerating the page display for the end user, making your application faster.

Every web server has a compression feature, but in most cases it's running from the same software stack as the rest of the server. Compressing data consumes processing resources that could be used for other things.

By consolidating data compression in a web-facing application delivery controller like AppBeat DC, you benefit in multiple ways:

• You free resources on web servers, essentially increasing the capacity of your existing infrastructure
  

• You benefit from high-performance, low-latency compression using specialized hardware that does not steal cycles from application performance.
  

So get ready for mobile, the smart phone users are already out there trying to use your site or web application, and they're getting more numerous.

Cyrus Patton wrote a posting for Mashable on "10 Easy Ways to Green Your Website" that is a good start if you're looking at reducing the impact of your web-based business.

Since we're always thinking about application performance here at Crescendo Networks, we were struck by his point about accelerating web performance as an energy efficiency measure. "Not only does every server request consume energy, the more time people spend waiting for your site to load, the more energy is consumed." We'd never really thought about it at that level.

While Patton stresses using environmentally-friendly web hosting services, there's a larger point for businesses running their own data centers: reducing the overall server footprint is a great to cut energy costs. Not only do you reduce the cost of powering multiple servers, you also cut down on the cooling and management costs associated with those servers.

A smart application delivery controller can help you reduce your web application footprint by offloading processes like TCP management, SSL encryption and compression from servers, freeing capacity. Improving server utilization by 300-500% can decrease the number of web servers you need by 75% or more.

Combine that with using energy-efficient servers, and you could add a real green tinge to your business in 2010 - and save some green as well!

• Simple, intuitive syntax
• Instant gratification, that is the ability to create small programs that do something useful and allow for graphic content
• Low cost IDE (preferably gratuitous)
• OO (Object Oriented) programming model. I wasn't sold on it from the start since I think the added complexity can obscure the gains

SmallBasic looked like a winner. As described in its site:

Small Basic is a project that's aimed at bringing "fun" back to programming. By providing a small and easy to learn programming language in a friendly and inviting development environment, Small Basic makes programming a breeze. Ideal for kids and adults alike, Small Basic helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.

The project comes from Microsoft DevLabs. It is constantly evolving, has an avid community and is completely free. The developers listen to their users and often implement their suggestions (they even implemented the associative arrays I suggested at a post on their forum).

SB runs over .NET and sports an attractive (if not feature rich) IDE. The programming language is a take on good ol' Basic and supports both text (console) applications and graphics ones.
 
So far, the kids' response is favorable. The ability to create mini-programs and instantly run them really help with the short attention span of today's youth. One of their favorite activities is modifying an existing program and immediately seeing how its look and behavior changes.

That is all for now. As the year progresses I may have some more insights on this subject.