Crescendo's Web Application Performance Blog

Site response time is key to the revenue success of any online company - and it continues to be an area for improvement and optimization.

Crescendo and Alexa have recently teamed up to offer realtime data to show exactly how your site is performing. You can run Crescendo's new performance calculator tool for realtime data or visit http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo to learn how your site compares to to other sites in terms of daily average response time.

Crescendo Networks' AppBeat architecture is the first and only application delivery solution that accelerates, optimizes and controls application performance from the Web front end down to the application transaction level.

Alexa has been crawling the Web since early 1996 and currently gathers approximately 1.6 Terabytes (1600 gigabytes) of Web content per day. This free content site helps IT administrators better understand their web site traffic load and site response times.

Need help understanding how an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) can optimize your site? Contact us today for a free performance consultation.

We wrote about Google adding a performance factor to its page rank algorithm a few months back when it hit the web rumor mill. Now Google has officially announced the news on the Google Webmaster blog.

Google backs up its decision to include performance with links to its own research showing that people spend less time on low-performing sites. Interestingly, their research indicates that the dampening effect of slower performance continues long after the delays disappear:

"Users exposed to the 400 ms delay for six weeks did 0.21% fewer searches on average during the five week period after we stopped injecting the delay."

From this time forward, a poor performing site not only costs you customer loyalty, it can lower your standing in Google search results, costing you additional 'organic' search results.

If you're already spending time and effort on search engine optimization, consider the benefits of performance optimization using an application delivery controller. And if you're not sure what kind of performance gains you can achieve, you can get a fast answer using Crescendo's Performance Calculator.

Some of the trivial options that come to mind are:

• When your website is under heavy traffic load
  
• When your website is not under heavy load but it's the height of the shopping season

Both of these, tie to the raw throughput the system needs to be able to handle. But is there more to it than raw throughput?

In real life, performance could also mean something that is awe inspiring, not necessarily the fastest - like a great play in arts or sports. In sound systems, the ones that perform the best have the highest fidelity of sound. In food, it means the most exquisite taste and display. And in photography it would usually mean the best quality of photos, not the fastest shutter speed.

Thinking back to our website domain, it seems that raw throughput matters, however not less importantly is the smoothness of a website's response. A site that responds to users rapidly and is consistently doing so in different traffic conditions and various loads, is a site that performs extremely well. It is the kind of site that end-users enjoy using. Compare this to sites that are not consistent; their behavior alone could drive end-users away.

It seems that it "matters most" every time end-users are visiting the site. It also seems that performance is not only raw speed, but rather the unique ability to respond consistently during changing circumstances with non-stop predictability.

Performance is something Crescendo does better than any rival product in the ADC market- and its core to your business success. Come see us at Interop booth #2431 and we will demonstrate just why you can rely on us when it matters most.

No, this blog is not about the limbo contest. Its about how fast you can make your web site respond to your customers and prospects.

We have built a very cool new marketing tool that allows you to understand the benefits of a hardware ADC. By deploying an AppBeat CN-7000 appliance, you are able to see great improvements in site response time, server utilization, bandwidth and the number of physical servers required. These calculations offer insight into your site performance.

Test your url today and let us know if you would like to set up time to discuss what makes our top performing hardware ADC the right choice.

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.

The virtual dust is still settling from all of those online shoppers on Thanksgiving weekend, and we've already learned a few things.

The action is online.  In-store sales volume changed little from last year, but online shopping is on the increase. Forrester predicts that online sales will rise 8% this season.

Black Friday goes virtual. The exact estimates vary, but everyone agrees that online sales grew this year over last year on Black Friday.  comScore claims an 11% increase over last year's Black Friday. With broadband access at home, people aren't waiting to get to the office for online deals.

Cyber Monday is still big. According to Akamai, an average of 4.3 million visitors per minute shopped online in North America on Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), peaking at 5.1 million per minute around 9:30 pm eastern time.

With online sales as the only rosy part of the forecast, online retailers cannot afford to alienate shoppers with web downtime or slow performance. So, how are retail sites doing handling these growing crowds?

Downtime is still an issue.  There were fewer major, public outages than last year, but downtime is still a persistent problem.  Almost half of the websites in a study by Uptrends experienced some level of downtime.

Performance dragged. Nearly all of the sites on Keynote's online retail shopping index showed performance slowdowns on Black Friday.

This research doesn't tell us the cost of those outages and slowdowns in terms of lost customers or abandoned shopping carts.  However, Amazon's 2008 site outage provided a glimpse into the revenue impact of downtime with losses estimated at $29,000 per minute or more than a million dollars an hour in sales. 
 
With the action online this holiday season, online retail sites have to be ready for it with consistent and fast web application performance.