SpeedGeeks LA videos now available
Quick follow-up on my blog post about SpeedGeeks LA, the performance meetup hosted at Shopzilla on Oct 26: Videos and slides from the presentations are now available:
- In Search of Speed – me (Google,slides, video)
- You Get What You Measure – Phil Dixon (Shopzilla,slides, video)
- A Holistic Approach to Building a High Performance Web Site – Paddy Hannon (Edmunds,slides, video)
- Latency Improvements for PicasaWeb – Gavin Doughtie (Google,slides, video)
- Performance-as-a-service – Morten Begai (Heroku,slides, video)
- MSFast – Jeremy Custenborder, Yadid Ramot (MySpace, download, video)
- Trace Down JavaScript & AJAX Performance in IE – Andreas Grabner (dynaTrace,slides, download, video)
- Application Architecture Determines Application Performance – Randy Stafford (Oracle,slides, video)
Definitely checkout the cool cars in Paddy’s slides.
Velocity OLC in December (discount #velfall09pcd)
The in-person Velocity conference is slated for June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara. But you don’t have to wait until then to whet your performance and operations appetite. On December 8 (less than 4 weeks from now!) the first Velocity Online Conference will be held.
Sessions include:
- How Web Speed Affects Online Business KPIs – Hooman Behesti (Strangeloop)
- Faster Load Times Through Deferred JavaScript Evaluation – Charles Jolley (Apple)
- Load Balancing & Reverse Proxies with Varnish & More – Artur Bergman (Wikia)
- CouchDB from 10,000 Feet – Chris Anderson (couch.io)
- A Roundtable Panel of Some of Your Favorite Velocity Web Ops Ninjas
The beauty of this format is anyone, anywhere can join in – all you need is a computer and an Internet connection. I’m especially excited to see the turnout from the international community (having just returned from Sweden, Amsterdam, and Berlin). The cost is $149. Use the velfall09pcd discount code for a 25% discount when you register.
I hope to hear you online December 8th. Here’s to a faster Internet!
SpeedGeeks LA at Shopzilla
I co-hosted a great web performance meetup yesterday called SpeedGeeks LA. The idea started when Phil Dixon invited me down to Shopzilla to give a talk. (Phil and I have stayed in touch after his amazing session at Velocity 2009.) Phil suggested we invite some other performance-minded companies in the area, and then we started talking about expanding it to include more speakers. We ended up with over 3 hours of presentations and nearly 150 people.
We had a great mix of talks (I hope to post all slides soon):
- In Search of Speed – I kicked it off talking about the importance of progressive enhancement as an enabler of progressive rendering. (slides)
- You Get What You Measure – A reprise of Phil’s talk from Velocity that includes the oft-cited stats about a 7-12% increase in revenue and 50% drop in server load thanks to faster performance.
- A Holistic Approach to Building a High Performance Web Site – Paddy Hannon (Edmunds) – A no-nonsense approach to instilling performance into the development process.
- Latency Improvements for PicasaWeb – Gavin Doughtie (Google) – Great tips from a web guru about what makes PicasaWeb fast.
- Performance-as-a-service – Morten Begai (Heroku) – Performance built-in to their Rails hosting environment.
- MSFast – Jeremy Custenborder, Yadid Ramot (MySpace) – Demo of MSFast plus a preview of what looks to be an awesome Flash profiler. Watch for it!
- Trace Down JavaScript & AJAX Performance in IE – Andreas Grabner (dynaTrace) – Check out their new dynaTrace Ajax Edition tool.
- Application Architecture Determines Application Performance – Randy Stafford (Oracle) – A reminder that sometimes you need to focus on backend performance, too.
Oracle was kind enough to sponsor lunch for everyone and raffle off a Wii. How awesome is that?!
A huge shoutout to Phil and the folks at Shopzilla, especially Lauren Moser. They hosted everyone at their headquarters and even handed out swag bags. The space was setup perfectly, with room for folks to group into smaller conversations during breaks. Just a top notch operation on all fronts.
I’m calling this the inaugural event for SpeedGeeks. My hope is that LA is just the first of many cities where SpeedGeeks gather to share knowledge about make the web faster. I’d like to see SpeedGeeks expand in a similar way as how Ignite events take place worldwide. If you’d like to pull together such an event in your city, contact me and we can brainstorm. I can rally performance gurus in the area and, who knows, I might even be able to drop-in and help co-host.
SpeedGeeks of the world unite!
Øredev, Fronteers, JSConf.eu
A contingent of web dev gurus are on their way to Europe the first week of November for some awesome conferences. If you haven’t signed up, check into it soon – seats are going fast.
The gurus I’ve been coordinating with include John Resig, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer. But there’s more! Other speakers/friends who I’m excited to techdown with are Christian Heilmann, PPK, Nicole Sullivan, Richard Campbell, Kyle Simpson, and Tom Hughes-Croucher.
The conferences (in chronological order) are:
- Øredev (Nov 2-6, Malmö, Sweden) – Malmö is right across the channel from Copenhagen. I’ve never been to Denmark or Sweden, so am psyched to check this out (and bring back some legos).
- Fronteers (Nov 5-6, Amsterdam) – This is what started it all for me. I heard the reviews of Fronteers 2008 and swore I was going to go this year. I have a lot of respect for PPK’s work, and am honored he asked me to present. I visited Amsterdam a few times and loved it, but it’s been 15 years so I’m excited to get back. Unfortunately, Fronteers 2009 is already sold out! If you didn’t get a ticket, check out one of the other conferences.
- JSConf.eu (Nov 7-8, Berlin) – I heard great things about JSConf in DC and wanted to get to know this group. It’s great that it follows so closely after Fronteers. My ancestors came from Germany, so I look forward to visiting Germany again.
I’ll be presenting at all three conferences, giving away a few books, and sitting down with developers in these countries to discuss the tech challenges they face, and hopefully pick up some best practices, especially with regard to performance.
I am so psyched for this trip! My wife and kids are bummed they’re not coming, so I can’t show any excitement at home. (Luckily, my wife doesn’t read my blog – don’t tell her how excited I am!) All three of these conferences are going to be great. I hope to see you there!
Business impact of high performance
Alistair Croll adds more evidence to the business case for high performance web sites in his blog post Proof that speeding up websites improves online business. This was the primary theme of Velocity 2009, and major web destinations shared their business case studies, including Bing, Google, and Shopzilla. Alistair rounds out the stats by answering the question: How big an impact does performance optimization have on the business metrics of a typical media or e-commerce site?
Alistair worked with his friends at Strangeloop Networks to gather the data. Strangeloop makes acceleration appliances that automatically optimize dynamic web apps in real time. They left the appliance off for half of the visitors and turned it on for the other half, and compared the differences. Some highlights from what they found:
- pages per visit grew from 11.04 to 15.64
- time spent on the site went from 23:50 to 30:10
- conversion rate increased 16.07%
- order value increased 5.51%
In addition to these metrics, we have data that shows improving web performance reduces operating costs. In his talk about Shopzilla’s performance improvements (video, slides), Phil Dixon mentions that the number of servers required to run their site dropped in half. Netflix’s outbound traffic dropped almost 50% as a result of the work done by Bill Scott and his team.
Web Performance Optimization improves user and business metrics. WPO also decreases operating costs by reducing hardware requirements and bandwidth, which in turn reduces carbon footprint. It’s a win on all fronts. We’re going to see even more case studies on the positive impact of performance optimization, and as a result, the interest in learning more about this field will continue to grow. In addition to speaking at Øredev, Fronteers, and JSConf.eu, I’m organizing a few other performance meetups in the next few months. Watch my blog for announcements.
Sau-dərs: “sour”, not “super”
After my exhausting three part post on SpriteMe, I need a lighter one tonight. Often at conferences I’ll be introduced as Steve Sü-dərs (like “super”). The spelling is almost always correct, “Souders”, but most people mispronounce my last name, so I don’t say anything. But I wanted to get the official pronunciation out there: it’s Sau-dərs (like “sour”). Would I rather be “super” than “sour”? Yes. But that’s just the way this cookie crumbles.
I found out last week that Nicholas pronounces his last name Zā-kəs, not Za-kəs. If your name gets mispronounced, or you know someone else who’s name gets butchered, feel free to clear that up right here.
jQuery Conference and The Ajax Experience
I’m heading out on the red-eye tonight for Boston. I’ll be there for three action-packed days!
Sunday morning I’m speaking at jQuery Conference ’09. Monday afternoon I’m doing a talk at The Ajax Experience. Both conferences look great. I’m excited to share what I know and talk with other web developers to find out their latest discoveries and also pain points, especially with regard to web performance. I’ll be giving away free copies of Even Faster Web Sites and will be announcing two new open source projects.
If you’re at either conference, please say “hi”.
OSCON and Page Responsiveness videos
I had a great time at OSCON a few weeks back. It was in San Jose this year. (Pro: I don’t have to travel and my wife can go to the parties. Con: I miss Portland.) Just as I wrote about last year, Gregg Pollack was there asking speakers to summarize their talks in 30 seconds. He published the results in the video series 5 Days of OSCON. I’m in the video for Day 3.
Gregg also pointed me to his Page Responsiveness webcast/video, where he talks about YSlow and the Google Ajax Libraries API. I really like this video. It’s informative, engaging, and short. They remind me of Aza Raskin’s webcasts on Ubiquity and Jetpack. These two guys are very talented in how they convey complex information in a hands-on way. I encourage you to take a look.
OmniTI and performance koolaid
In YSlow! to YFast! in 45 minutes, Theo Schlossnagle (CEO of OmniTI) delivers a play-by-play about how he made his corporate web site 35% faster. The amazing revelation in his commentary is that he was able to complete all of these improvements while sitting in my workshop at Velocity (ahem).
OmniTI is a full service web house, specializing in web performance and scalability. The irony of the fact that their corp web site received a YSlow “F” wasn’t wasted on Theo. The cobbler’s children syndrome. (Same is true on my web site – I’ve got to optimize WordPress!)
Theo walks through his changes one-by-one: adding a far future Expires header, removing ETags, compressing text responses especially scripts and stylesheets, and moving resources to a CDN without cookies. With less than 45 minutes work, his site went from a load time of 486 milliseconds down to 315 milliseconds.
There’s more low hanging fruit – consolidating scripts, consolidating stylesheets, and CSS sprites. But it’s great to get this early case study on specific improvements and their corresponding impact on performance. I hope he’ll share the results from the next wave of optimizations.
Wikia: fast pages retain users
At OSCON last week, I attended Artur Bergman’s session about Varnish – A State of the Art High-Performance Reverse Proxy. Artur is the VP of Engineering and Operations at Wikia. He has been singing the praises of Varnish for awhile. It was great to see his experiences and resulting advice in one presentation. But what really caught my eye was his last slide:
Wikia measures exit rate – the percentage of users that leave the site from a given page. Here they show that exit rate drops as pages get faster. The exit rate goes from ~15% for a 2 second page to ~10% for a 1 second page. This is another data point to add to the list of stats from Velocity that show that faster pages is not only better for users, it’s better for business.