Velocity Europe – High Performance Berlin!
Velocity Europe is less than two weeks away. It’s happening November 8-9 in Berlin at the Hotel Maritim ProArte. I’ve heard good things about the venue and am excited to get there and check it out.
This event has been a long time coming. A handful of web performance and operations savants (including members of the Program Committee) have been encouraging us for years to bring Velocity to Europe, and now it’s actually happening. And (drum roll please) the price is only EUR 600 (excl. VAT) if you use the 20% discount code veu11sts. (And don’t forget about the free Velocity Online Conference this week – see more below.)
The Velocity Europe speaker line-up is exceptional. Some highlights include:
- Jon Jenkins from Amazon.com is talking about their approach to the challenges of mobile browsing. Jon is the Director of Software Development for Amazon Silk. I’m looking forward to more details about Silk’s split architecture.
- Tim Morrow delivers the background for Betfair’s promise to deliver a fast experience to their customers, and their progress on that promise.
- Theo Schlossnagle is a recognized leader at Velocity. He’s giving two talks on web operations careers and monitoring.
- Estelle Weyl joins Velocity for the first time talking about the nuances of mobile rendering performance. I learn something new everytime I hear Estelle speak, so am excited to welcome her to Velocity.
- Ivo Teel discusses the balance we all face between features and performance and how they’re handling that at Spil Games.
- Jeff Veen knows the importance of 3rd party performance and availability as the CEO of Typekit. Jeff’s an amazing, engaging speaker. Reading his session description gave me goosebumps with anticipation: Jeff sat on a couch in the Typekit offices, staring out the window, and wondering if everything their company had been working towards was about to slip through their fingers…
There’s much much more – lightning demos, browser vendor talks, Allspaw on anticipating failure, Mandelin on JavaScript performance – I’ve got to stop here but please check out the entire schedule.
I want to give a shout out to the Velocity Europe Program Committee: Patrick Debois, Aaron Peters, Schlomo Schapiro, Jeroen Tjepkema, and Sean Treadway. They’ve participated in numerous video concalls (yay Google Hangouts!) to review proposals, build the program, and shape Velocity to be a European conference. And they might have one more card up their sleeve – more on that later.
You can get a free warm-up for Velocity Europe at the Velocity Online Conference this week. It’s Wednesday October 26 9-11:30am PDT. John Allspaw, Velocity co-chair, has rounded up four speakers to cover several hot topics including monitoring, global DNS, and making yourself even more awesome(!). It’s free, but you have to register for Velocity OLC if you want to get in on the conversation.
If you’re heading to Berlin you should also check out CounchConf Berlin on Nov 7. NoSQL has great performance benefits and Couchbase is a good choice for many mobile apps. Use couchconf_discount for 10% off registration.
The last time I was in Berlin was for JSConf.eu 2009. The city had a high tech vibe and the crowd was extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic. I’m excited to get back to Berlin for Velocity Europe and do the web performance and operations deep dives that are the core of Velocity. If you want to have a website that’s always fast and always up, Velocity Europe is the place to be. I hope to see you there.
Velocity China
I returned from Velocity China yesterday. It was a great, great conference. It sold out with ~600 people – the main ballroom was standing room only for the morning keynoters. One thing I noticed that’s different in China – people fill in the seats from the front back, whereas in the US people have to be encouraged to move up to the front.
There were 35 sessions. I invited several speakers from the U.S.:
- Changhao Jiang (Facebook) talked about some of the performance projects he’s worked on including BigPipe, Quickling, and PageCache. This was a great talk covering a lot of material. He was mobbed with questions afterward:
- David Wei (also from Facebook) did two talks. The first was about managing static resources – caching, combining scripts, etc. The second was about the challenges of setting up a performance practice and culture within an organization such as Facebook. This is a topic I get asked about frequently and we need a talk like this at Velocity US.
- Doug Crockford (Yahoo!) did two talks as well. His first was Using JavaScript Well – a focus on the good parts of JavaScript. The second talk was called There and Back Again – a much needed presentation about the potential of JavaScript running on the server.
- Daniel Hunt (also from Yahoo!) did a talk on the performance optimizations behind the Yahoo! Mail rewrite. This also talked about serverside JavaScript and their use of the mustache templating system.
- Alex Nicksay (YouTube) described four specific performance improvements made to YouTube. This talk was great because he included quantified load time results for each improvement. He also talked about their UIX widget system when should be open sourced soon. The slides contain almost all the code anyway.
- I did two talks. One was a variation of my Even Faster Web Sites presentation with some new slides talking about how script loading has changed dramatically in just the last few years. My other talk was about the arrival of the WPO industry. This is a new talk that includes my view of the main phases of building an industry-wide focus on performance.
A special treat that I was able to pull together at the last minute was presentations from the Chrome, IE9, and Firefox 4 teams. These browser talks are always popular at the Velocity US conference. Web developers understand that having fast browsers is critical to improving the user experience, and these browser teams have responded with tremendous focus on performance the last few years.
The other sessions were arranged by my co-chair Zhang Wen Song (Taobao). The presentations in the main ballroom were translated to English, and I also sat through presentations in Chinese. The translated talks were very good mostly focusing on the operations side of Velocity – availability, scaling, CDNs, and more. I had trouble following the talks that were only in Chinese although slides that had code or charts are universal. But I could tell these were good speakers – they were at ease up on stage, they engaged the audience, and their slides looked good.
Here’s some of the back story around how Velocity China happened: Velocity China is the first conference O’Reilly has done in China. And it sold out! A great start. We held it in Beijing since O’Reilly has an office there. But it’s not a very big office – just four employees headed up by Michelle Chen. This team of four people organized their first conference and pulled off a great event. Huge credit to Michelle and her team. I got to meet all them – Douglas, Donna, and Jian – they were incredible hosts taking us out to dinner every night and arranging drivers and tours.
O’Reilly partnered with Taobao on Velocity China. It was critical to have someone building up the conference program direction and content from China. The co-chair, Zhang Wen Song, arranged the program and also delivered a great opening keynote. Joshua Zhu, also from Taobao, helped with emceeing many of the Chinese sessions.
I want to thank O’Reilly and Taobao for making Velocity China happen. I also want to thank all the people I met there. I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the developers. Even with the language challenges, I had deep conversations during the breaks with attendees. There’s no doubt that performance is a big focus in China. With the success of this conference I’m confident we’ll be back again next year.
Velocity: TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance
John Rauser (Amazon) was my favorite speaker at Velocity. His keynote on Creating Cultural Change was great. I recommend you watch the video.
John did another session that was longer and more technical entitled TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance. Unfortunately this wasn’t scheduled in the videotape room. But yesterday Mike Bailey contacted me saying he had recorded the talk with his Flip. With John’s approval, Mike has uploaded his video of John Rauser’s TCP talk from Velocity. This video runs out before the end of the talk, so make sure to follow along in the slides so you can walk through the conclusion yourself. [Update: Mike Bailey uploaded the last 7 minutes, so now you can hear the conclusion directly from John!]
John starts by taking a stab at what we should expect for coast-to-coast roundtrip latency:
- Roundtrip distance between the west coast and the east coast is 7400 km.
- The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792.458 km/second.
- So the theoretical minimum for roundtrip latency is 25 ms.
- But light’s not traveling in a vacuum. It’s propagating in glass in fiber optic cables.
- The index of refraction of glass is 1.5, which means light travels at 66% of the speed in glass that it does in a vacuum.
- So a more realistic roundtrip latency is ~37 ms.
- Using a Linksys wireless router and a Comcast cable connection, John’s roundtrip latency is ~90ms. Which isn’t really that bad, given the other variables involved.
The problem is it’s been like this for well over a decade. This is about the same latency that Stuart Cheshire found in 1996. This is important because as developers we know that network latency matters when it comes to building a responsive web app.
With that backdrop, John launches into a history of TCP that leads us to the current state of network latency. The Internet was born in September of 1981 with RFC 793 documenting the Transmission Control Protocol, better known as TCP.
Given the size of the TCP window (64 kB) there was a chance for congestion, as noted in Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks (RFC 896):
Should the round-trip time exceed the maximum retransmission interval for any host, that host will begin to introduce more and more copies of the same datagrams into the net. The network is now in serious trouble. Eventually all available buffers in the switching nodes will be full and packets must be dropped. Hosts are sending each packet several times, and eventually some copy of each packet arrives at its destination. This is congestion collapse.
This condition is stable. Once the saturation point has been reached, if the algorithm for selecting packets to be dropped is fair, the network will continue to operate in a degraded condition. Congestion collapse and pathological congestion are not normally seen in the ARPANET / MILNET system because these networks have substantial excess capacity.
Although it’s true that in 1984, when RFC 896 was written, the Internet had “substantial excess capacity”, that quickly changed. In 1981 there were 213 hosts on the Internet. But the number of hosts started growing rapidly. In October of 1986, with over 5000 hosts on the Internet, there occurred the first in a series of congestion collapse events.
This led to the development of the TCP slow start algorithm, as described in RFCs 2581, 3390, and 1122. The key to this algorithm is the introduction of a new concept called the congestion window (cwnd) which is maintained by the server. The basic algorithm is:
- initalize cwnd to 3 full segments
- increment cwnd by one full segment for each ACK
TCP slow start was widely adopted. As seen in the following packet flow diagram, the number of packets starts small and doubles, thus avoiding the congestion collision experienced previously.
There were still inefficiencies, however. In some situations, too many ACKs would be sent. Thus we now have the delayed ACK algorithm from RFC 813. So the nice packet growth seen above now looks like this:
At this point, after referencing so many RFCs and showing numerous ACK diagrams, John aptly asks, “Why should we care?” Sadly, the video stops at this point around slide 160. But if we continue through the slides we see how John brings us back to what web developers deal with on a daily basis.
Keeping in mind that the size of a segment is 1460 bytes (“1500 octets” as specified in RFC 894 minus 40 bytes for TCP and IP headers), we see how many roundtrips are required to deliver various payload sizes. (I overlaid a kB conversion in red.)
John’s conclusion is that “TCP slow start means that network latency strictly limits the throughput of fresh connections.” He gives these recommendations for what can be done about the situation:
- Carefully consider every byte of content
- Think about what goes into those first few packets
- 2.1 Keep your cookies small
- 2.2 Open connections for assets in the first three packets
- 2.3 Download small assets first
- Accept the speed of light (move content closer to users)
All web developers need at least a basic understanding of the protocol used by their apps. John delivers a great presentation that is informative and engaging, with real takeaways. Enjoy!
Velocity: Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS
Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov had the #3 highest rated session at Velocity – The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS. Nicole (aka, “stubbornella”) wrote a blog post summarizing their work. The motivator for paying attention to CSS are these stats that show how bad things are across the Alexa Top 1000:
- 42% don’t GZIP CSS
- 44% have more than 2 CSS external files
- 56% serve CSS with cookies
- 62% don’t minify
- 21% have greater than 100K of CSS
Many of these problems are measured by YSlow and Page Speed, but the solutions still aren’t widely adopted. Nicole goes on to highlight more best practices for reducing the impact of CSS including minimizing float and using a reset stylesheet.
Checkout the slides and video of Nicole and Stoyan’s talk to learn how to avoid having CSS block your page from rendering.
| Choose Your Own Adventure | Adam Jacob | Opscode |
| TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance | John Rauser | Amazon |
| The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS | Nicole Sullivan | Consultant |
| Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage | Nicholas Zakas | Yahoo! |
| Hidden Scalability Gotchas in Memcached and Friends | Neil Gunther | Performance Dynamics Company |
| Internet Explorer 9 | Jason Weber | Microsoft |
| Creating Cultural Change | John Rauser | Amazon |
| Scalable Internet Architectures | Theo Schlossnagle | OmniTI |
| Ignite Velocity | Andrew Shafer | Cloudscaling |
| The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster Into an Opportunity | Lenny Rachitsky | Webmetrics/Neustar |
| Metrics 101: What to Measure on Your Website | Sean Power | Watching Websites |
| The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle: Fast by Default Before Our Eyes? | Joshua Bixby | Strangeloop Networks |
| Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques | Anne Sullivan | |
| Chrome Fast. | Mike Belshe |
Back to blogging after Velocity
The last few weeks have been hectic. I was in London and Paris for 10 days. I returned a day before Velocity started. Most of you experienced or have heard about the awesomeness that was Velocity – great speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Right after Velocity I headed up to Foo Camp at O’Reilly HQ. This week I’ve been catching up on all the email that accumulated over three weeks.
During this time blogging has taken a backseat. But now that my head is above water I want to start relaying some of the key takeaways from Velocity. I wrote my Velocity wrap-up and mentioned my favorite sessions. But here are the top 10 sessions based on the attendee ratings:
- Choose Your Own Adventure by Adam Jacob, Opscode (unofficial video snippets)
- TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance by John Rauser, Amazon (slides)
- The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS by Nicole Sullivan, consultant and Stoyan Stefanov, Yahoo! (video)
- Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage by Nicholas Zakas, Yahoo! (slides)
- Hidden Scalability Gotchas in Memcached and Friends by Neil Gunther Performance Dynamics and Shanti Subramanyam and Stefan Parvu, Oracle (video)
- Internet Explorer 9 by Jason Weber, Microsoft (slides)
- Creating Cultural Change by John Rauser, Amazon (video)
- Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle, OmniTI (slides)
- The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster Into an Opportunity by Lenny Rachitsky, Webmetrics/Neustar (video, slides)
- Tied for #10:
- Metrics 101: What to Measure on Your Website by Sean Power, Watching Websites (slides)
- The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle: Fast by Default Before Our Eyes? by Joshua Bixby and Hooman Beheshti, Strangeloop Networks
- Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques by Anne Sullivan, Google (slides)
- Chrome Fast. by Mike Belshe, Google (slides)
Some things to highlight: Adam Jacob is an incredible speaker – insightful and funny. John Rauser is the speaker I enjoyed the most – he shows up twice at #2 and #7. Two of the browser presentations registered. The workshops this year were incredible and very well attended – four of them registered in the top 10 (#8, #10a, #10b, and #10c). Annie Sullivan rated high and it was her first time speaking at a conference.
The last two years at Velocity we’ve only been able to videotape the talks in one room, so this year that means about a third of the talks were videotaped. Four of these top rated sessions were taped. Next year I’ll try to get more of the top speakers in the video room. I’ve asked the five speakers without slides to upload them to the Velocity web site. Check back next week if you want those.
I actually feel electricity running up and down my spine looking over these talks. To think I had something to do with pulling these gurus together and offering a place for them to share what they know – it’s humbling and exhilarating at the same time. I’ll be doing some more Velocity-related posts on specific sessions next week, so stay tuned.
| Choose Your Own Adventure | Adam Jacob | Opscode |
| TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance | John Rauser | Amazon |
| The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS | Nicole Sullivan | Consultant |
| Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage | Nicholas Zakas | Yahoo! |
| Hidden Scalability Gotchas in Memcached and Friends | Neil Gunther | Performance Dynamics Company |
| Internet Explorer 9 | Jason Weber | Microsoft |
| Creating Cultural Change | John Rauser | Amazon |
| Scalable Internet Architectures | Theo Schlossnagle | OmniTI |
| Ignite Velocity | Andrew Shafer | Cloudscaling |
| The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster Into an Opportunity | Lenny Rachitsky | Webmetrics/Neustar |
| Metrics 101: What to Measure on Your Website | Sean Power | Watching Websites |
| The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle: Fast by Default Before Our Eyes? | Joshua Bixby | Strangeloop Networks |
| Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques | Anne Sullivan | |
| Chrome Fast. | Mike Belshe |
Velocity wrap-up
Velocity ended yesterday at 6pm – and the final presentations from 5:20-6:00 were still packed! It was a great conference. I’m wiped out from talking web performance from 8am to 10pm the last three days.
The highlight of the conference was the conference itself:
- 1200 attendees
- 89 speakers
- 28 sponsors
- 26 exhibitors
Compare that to the numbers for Velocity 2008: 600 attendees, 65 speakers, 9 sponsors, 17 exhibitors. The growth is a testimonial for how the focus on web performance and operations has increased in just 2 years. Companies know their web sites have to be fast, available, and scalable. That’s why they come to Velocity.
We added a third track this year on Culture which meant I wasn’t able to attend every performance talk. But here are the talks I saw that really stood out:
- Creating Cultural Change (video) and TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance (slides) – John Rauser (Amazon) was the breakthrough speaker of the conference. Both talks not only had great content, they were also funny and delivered with style.
- Datacenter Infrastructure Innovation (video) – James Hamilton (Amazon) presents surprising stats about the true costs of infrastructure services.
- Speed Matters (video) – Urs Hölzle (Google) evangelizes creating a faster web via a long list of performance initiatives. Make sure to check out the links at the end to SSL and congestion window improvements.
- The O’Reilly Radar (video, slides) – Tim O’Reilly leads the rally cry for the critical role of performance and operations to the future of the Web.
- Don’t Let Third Parties Slow You Down (video, slides) – Michael Kleber (Google) presents some great stats on the impact of 3rd party content, and at the end slips in some performance improvements he’s working on for Google AdSense.
- JSMeter: Characterizing Real-World Behavior of JavaScript Programs (slides) – Ben Zorn (Microsoft Research) reveals how unrepresentative today’s benchmarks are compared to real web sites. I really recommend you check out his charts.
- Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage (slides) – Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!) provided a case study of adding advanced performance techniques including progressive enhancement.
There were other great talks such as The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS and Google Maps API v3 – Built First for Mobile for which we’re still waiting for slides and possibly video. I encourage you to check out all the slides and videos – remember, I was only able to sit in on one of three tracks. There’s a lot more to see.
Thanks for making Velocity 2010 so amazing. I’ll see you at Velocity 2011! (Remember to register early!)
Velocity is coming fast June 22-24
Jesse Robbins and I co-chair Velocity – the web performance and operations conference run by O’Reilly. This year’s Velocity is coming fast (get it?) – June 22-24 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is the third year for Velocity. The first two years sold out, and this year is looking even stronger. We’ve added a third track so that’s 50% more workshops and sessions. That means more gurus to talk to and more topics to choose from.
Jesse did a post today about the ops side of the conference. Here are some of my favorites from the web performance track:
- Mobile Web High Performance – This workshop (workshops are on Tues June 22) is by O’Reilly author Maximiliano Firtman. Mobile is big and only a few people (including Maximiliano) know the performance side of mobile. His book? Programming the Mobile Web
- Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques – The most important pattern I recommend for today’s web sites is to render the page quickly and adorn later with JavaScript. Some of the more advanced web apps are doing this, but otherwise it’s not a well known pattern. Annie is one of my favorite performance developers at Google. She has built sites that do progressive enhancement, so I’m super psyched that she agreed to give this workshop. Very important for anyone with a bunch of JavaScript in their site.
- Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage – Nicholas Zakas, JavaScript performance guru, talks about the real world story of making Yahoo! front page twice as fast.
- The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS – Nicole Sullivan (consultant) and Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo!) share their lessons learned optimizing the CSS for Facebook and Yahoo! Search.
- The Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer teams will be there to talk about the latest performance improvements to their browsers. That’s followed by the Browser Panel where you get to ask more questions.
- Lightning Demos on Wed and Thurs will give everyone a chance to see dynaTrace, Firebug, YSlow, Page Speed, HttpWatch, AOL (Web)Pagetest, Speed Tracer, and Fiddler.
- We have an amazing line-up of keynoters: Wednesday morning features James Hamilton (Amazon), Urs Hölzle (Google), and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media). All in one morning! Thursday brings back John Adams (Twitter) and Bobby Johnson (Facebook). Their Velocity 2009 talks were standing room only.
I’m looking forward to all the talks and catching up with the speakers. I’m most excited about the hallway conversations. It’s great hearing about what other developers have discovered during their own performance optimization projects. I especially enjoy how accessible the speakers are. It’s amazing how willing everyone is to share what they’ve learned and to work together to advance the state of web performance and operations. After all, that’s what Velocity is all about.
WPO – Web Performance Optimization
Everybody loves web performance
When I started evangelizing high performance web sites back in 2004, I felt like a lone voice in the woods. Fast forward six years to Fred Wilson speaking at the Future of Web Apps. Fred is a (the) top tech VC from NYC with investments in companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy, and FeedBurner. He spoke about the 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps. Guess what was #1 on his list?
First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. [...]
We think that the application has to be fast, and if it’s not, you can see what happens. We have every single one of our portfolio company services on Pingdom, and we take a look at that every week. When we see some of our portfolio company’s applications getting bogged down, we also note that they don’t grow as quickly. There is real empirical evidence that substantiates the fact that speed is more than a feature. It’s a requirement.
What started as a list of performance tips coded up in a browser plug-in has evolved to the point where a “leading voice of the venture capital finance community in the nation’s largest city” is citing speed as the #1 principle for successful web apps.
Impact of performance on the bottom line
This is confirmation that what we set as the theme for Velocity 2009 – “the impact of performance on the bottom line” – was timely and impactful. I suggested that theme because after years of evangelizing web performance to the tech community I realized we needed to reach other parts of the organization (managements, sales, marketing, etc.) to get support for the work needed to make web sites fast. Here are some of the now well known performance success stories that came from Velocity 2009 and afterward.
The major search engines measured how much web site slowdowns hurt their business metrics:
- Bing – A page that was 2 seconds slower resulted in a 4.3% drop in revenue/user.
- Google – A 400 millisecond delay caused a 0.59% drop in searches/user.
- Yahoo! – A 400 milliseconds slowdown resulted in a 5-9% drop in full-page traffic.
On the faster side, companies from a variety of vertical markets had praise for the benefits gained from improving performance:
- Shopzilla – Speeding up their site by 5 seconds increased the conversion rate 7-12%, doubled the number of sessions from search engine marketing, and cut the number of required servers in half.
- Mozilla – Shaving 2.2 seconds off their landing pages increased download conversions by 15.4%, which they estimate will result in 60 million more Firefox downloads per year.
- Netflix – Adopting a single optimization, gzip compression, resulted in a 13-25% speedup and cut their outbound network traffic by 50%.
Google, in their ongoing effort to make the Web faster, blogged last month that “we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.” This is yet another way in which improving web performance will have a positive impact on the bottom line.
Web Performance Optimization – an emerging industry
This convergence of awareness, even urgency, on the business side and growing expertise in the tech community around web performance marks the beginning of a new industry that I’m calling “WPO” – Web Performance Optimization. WPO is similar to SEO in that optimizing web performance drives more traffic to your web site. But WPO doesn’t stop there. As evidenced by the success stories mentioned earlier, WPO also improves the user experience, increases revenue, and reduces operating costs.
Having just announced this new industry, let me be the first to give my predictions on what we’ll see in the near future. Here’s my top ten list done in Letterman fashion:
- Fast by default - To make it easier for developers, we’ll see performance best practices get built in to CMSs, templating languages (PHP, Python, etc.), clouds (AWS, Google App Engine), JavaScript libraries, and most importantly in major conduits of the Web – browsers, servers, and proxies. A lot of this is already happening, such as jQuery’s focus on performance and performance optimizations in Rails.
- Visibility into the browser – In order to make web pages faster, developers need the ability to find which parts are slow. This requires visibility into the time it takes for JavaScript execution, applying CSS, repainting, DOM manipulation, and more. We’re seeing early forays into this area with tools like Speed Tracer and dynaTrace Ajax Edition.
- Consolidation – Projects around web performance tools, metrics, and services have been disjoint efforts. That’s going to change. We’ll see tools that combine JavaScript debugging, JavaScript profiling, DOM inspection, network utilization, and more – all in one tool. Performance metrics will be aggregated in one dashboard, rather than having to visit multiple separate services. Consolidation will also happen at the company level, where smaller performance-related companies are acquired by larger consulting and services companies.
- TCP, HTTP – The network on which the Web works needs to be optimized. SPDY is one proposal. I also think we need to try to get more support for pipelining. Any improvements made to the underlying network will trickle down to every site and user on the Web.
- Standards – We’re going to see standards established in the areas of measuring performance, benchmarks, and testing. The Web Timing Spec is one example that exists today.
- Industry Organizations – Within the WPO industry we’ll see the growth of professional organizations, training, certification, standards bodies, and cooperatives. An example of a cooperative that came through my inbox today was a proposal for web publishers to share information about slow ads.
- Data – Monitoring performance and finding new performance opportunities requires analyzing data. I predict we’ll see public repositories of performance-related data made available. My favorite example that I’d love to see is an Internet Performance Archive, similar to the existing Internet Archive except that the IPA’s wayback machine would show the performance characteristics of a web site over time.
- green – Finally we’ll see studies conducted that quantify how improving web performance reduces power consumption and ultimately shrinks the Web’s carbon footprint.
- mobile – Mobile performance is at square one. We need to gather metrics, find the major performance pain points and their root causes, discover solutions, create tools, evangelize the newly discovered best practices, and collect new success stories.
- speed as a differentiator – Going forward, many of the decisions made around the Web will be based on performance. Customer device purchases, vendor selection, web site reviews, and user loyalty will all include performance as a major consideration.
There’s a lot of work to be done. It’s all going to be interesting and will greatly improve the Web that we use everyday. If you have the interest and time, contact me. There are tons of open source projects that need to be started. I look forward to working with you on making a faster web.
[This blog post is based on my presentation from Web 2.0 Expo. The slides from that talk are available as Powerpoint and on Slideshare.]
Velocity OLC, upcoming events
Velocity is the O’Reilly conference Jesse Robbins and I co-chair. This is our third year and it’ll be bigger and better than ever. Dates are June 22-24. We’re almost done reviewing proposals and the speaker line-up so far looks great: mobile, browsers, tools, JavaScript, metrics, and more all covered from a performance perspective. I hope you’ll be able to make it.
As a warm up to Velocity in June, O’Reilly had the great idea of starting Velocity OLC (OnLine Conference). We had the first one on December 8 with great speakers including Mike Belshe (Chrome, SPDY), Charles Jolley (SproutCore), and J Chris Anderson (CouchDB). The next Velocity OLC is coming up fast – March 17 9-11:15am (PST). The agenda is:
- Site Performance in Google Webmaster Tools – Sreeram Ramachandran (Google)
- MySQL Abuse – Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr)
- Keeping Track of Your Performance Using Show Slow – Sergey Chernyshev (truTV)
- Provisioning Toolchain – Lee Thompson (DTO Solutions)
- Diagnose and Prevent JavaScript/AJAX Performance Issues in Internet Explorer – Andreas Grabner (dynaTrace Software)
The event is free! I invited the performance speakers, Sreeram, Sergey, and Andi, because they’ve released these amazing, free tools that all web developers focused on performance should know about. I hope you’ll tune in.
I also want to mention my next few speaking appearances.
JSConf.US (April 17&18, DC) – I missed the first two years of this conference and was bummed. I heard so many good things about it, I jumped at the chance to speak at JSConf.EU last November in Berlin and it exceeded my high expectations. Now I get to experience the main event. And I’ll be back in my old (20 years ago) stomping grounds!
Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco (May 3-6) – This event is sentimental for me. 4 years ago Tenni Theurer and I showed up to do a workshop on Sunday. It was beautiful outside and we figured everyone would be out sightseeing. Instead, 300+ people showed up. That was the first conference I had spoken at in a decade, and was the beginning of the evangelism campaign that I carry on today. I’ve spoken here every year and it’s always a great, smart crowd. Super hallway discussions.
@media (London, June 8-11) – Dion and Ben turned me on to Web Directions, speaking highly of all the conferences they run. I reached out to John Allsopp and he was kind enough to put me on the speaker list. I’m pysched to see some of the speakers I know well, plus some I’ve never met. And it’s a great opportunity for me to touch base with EU web devs focused on performance. Use the “SOUDERS” discount code.
Definitely grab me if you’re at any of these events. I want to know about your biggest performance bottleneck, and tips & tricks you’d like to share. And I’m always happy to sit down with a packet sniffer and do some performance analysis on the fly.
Velocity CFP now open!
Velocity 2010 is just around the corner!
Well, actually, it’s not until June 22-24, 2010. But Jesse and I have already been working with the O’Reilly conferences team for a few months. We have the venue – Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. We have the theme – Fast by Default. We have the cool blur motion speed image. The Program Committee signed on for another year: John Allspaw, Artur Bergman, Scott Ruthfield, Eric Schurman, and Mandi Walls. We’re already fielding calls from sponsors and exhibitors. The next step is speakers. That’s where you come in.
The Call for Participation for Velocity 2010 just opened today. We want to hear proposals for web performance and operations topics that you’re passionate to share. Some suggested areas include:
- Web frameworks with built-in performance
- Effective cloud computing
- Profiling web applications (esp. JavaScript)
- Network performance – HTTP, TCP, DNS
- NoSQL
- Mobile performance
- Evangelizing performance within your company
This is Velocity’s third year. The first two years were incredible. I’d love to see you at this year’s conference. If you’ve been working on something that other SpeedGeeks should hear about, submit a proposal now.