Web Performance 101: The Bandwidth Myth
Web Performance and the impact of SPDY, HTTP/2 and QUIC
April 21, 2016

Jean Tunis
RootPerformance

Share this

As websites continue to advance, the underlying protocols that they run on top of must change in order to meet the demands of user expected page load times. This blog is the first in a series on APMdigest where I will discuss web application performance and how new protocols like SPDY, HTTP/2, and QUIC will hopefully improve it so we can have happy website users.

Web Performance 101

The performance of your website is obviously very important. When visitors comes to your company website, they won't stick around very long if it's slow. If those visitors are users of your web application, they may not be for long if they encounter a consistently slow performing app.

Google and other companies have done studies showing that users begin to think of leaving a site if they see nothing within 1 second. Much of this is from a book written by Jakob Nielsen in 1993 called Usability Engineering. Since that time, 1-second response times have been the benchmark of a fast performing website. It still is today, and is not likely change over time.

As performance degrades to over 1 second, users start to think about going elsewhere. If there are other legitimate competitors, you're probably lost that visitor to them already. At 10 seconds of page loading, most users are long gone, even with no competitors. Most will not suffer through waiting that long for a webpage to load.

It's clear to see that a slow website will affect your company's bottom line, particularly if you do most or all of your business online. A slow site leads to higher bounce rate when the visitor hits the Back button before seeing the goodness of your products or services. A slow site also leads to lower conversions because visitors won't buy what you're selling because they may equate the slow site to a poor product or service.

So we want to make our websites and web applications fast. But how can we go about doing that?

First let me tell you about a myth ...

The Bandwidth Myth

According to CDN provider Akamai's State of the Internet report published for Q3 2015, the global average connection speed for the Internet was measured at 5.1Mbps. The top 10 countries are well above that figure with a minimum speed of 14Mbps. Average peaks are measured at 32.2Mbps.

5.1Mbps may seem small for those who live in areas with much higher available speeds for businesses and residents. For others, this may be blazing fast. It's all local.

But anyone who has worked in performance engineering or similar fields knows that bandwidth capacity or speed isn't the only parameter that determine good web performance. In fact, it's very insignificant, especially nowadays with big bandwidth speeds possible, as evidenced by Akamai's report.

Many Internet service providers, however, don't advertise them that way.

They talk up bandwidth, while barely mentioning some other more important parameters: network latency, server response time, application design, etc. Bandwidth speed is not nearly as much as important as how low a latency there is between where the web server is located, and where visitors are coming from.

So how do we go about looking on the other parameters? Let's first look at what happens when make a web request.

Anatomy of a Web Page Request

A web page request involves many steps.

We have:

■ DNS requests

■ Opening up TCP connections

■ Authenticating with TLS

■ The HTTP request itself to get web page data

■ Processing of the request on the server

■ The download of the requested content

There can be many substeps in between, but that's it at a high level. So it is very important to optimize the above steps to ensure that they are occurring as fast as possible, and improve web performance.

But how can you do that?

Glad you asked. Read Web Performance 101 - 4 Recommendations to Improve Web Performance for some common recommendations to optimize the steps of a web page request.

Jean Tunis is Principal Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance
Share this

The Latest

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...

March 14, 2024

The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...

March 13, 2024

In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...

March 12, 2024

eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...

March 11, 2024

Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...

March 07, 2024
In this digital era, consumers prefer a seamless user experience, and here, the significance of performance testing cannot be overstated. Application performance testing is essential in ensuring that your software products, websites, or other related systems operate seamlessly under varying conditions. However, the cost of poor performance extends beyond technical glitches and slow load times; it can directly affect customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Understand the tangible and intangible consequences of poor application performance and how it can affect your business ...
March 06, 2024

Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...

March 05, 2024

Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...

March 04, 2024

This year's Super Bowl drew in viewership of nearly 124 million viewers and made history as the most-watched live broadcast event since the 1969 moon landing. To support this spike in viewership, streaming companies like YouTube TV, Hulu and Paramount+ began preparing their IT infrastructure months in advance to ensure an exceptional viewer experience without outages or major interruptions. New Relic conducted a survey to understand the importance of a seamless viewing experience and the impact of outages during major streaming events such as the Super Bowl ...