FOWA: Loading times. How can we speed things up?

Last month I attended the Future of Web Apps (FoWA) conference in London. So as a PHP developer here at PlusNet, how did this conference help me, and what are we doing at PlusNet take these lessons on board?

I’m going to focus on one of the presentation from the conference titled “High performance Websites” and was presented by Steve Saunders who is the chief of Performance at Yahoo.

Making your page fast for first time and regular visitors is key to a better user experience. If your first impression of the PlusNet service is a slow and clunky website, then you may feel – and rightly, that the rest of the service we offer would be slow and clunky. Also if you regularly use our website and the performance drops, you would wonder what other services are no longer what they should be. This isn’t only true for our customers, but true for the employee’s here in PlusNet as well. There are many tools we use to automate our systems, to give you a quicker and more reliable server. If these tools are slow, then they loose there usefulness, and they start to hinder rather than help.

As with most business, we have a programme in place to help scale our business to improve our current service and plan for future requirements.

Part of that scaling involves scaling our web servers, to deal with more and more customers using our Portal, and improve the service that they are receiving.

So where would you start? Adding new web servers? Upgrading hardware with faster processors or more memory?

These are all valid options, and part of our web server scaling programme. But we’re also looking at what we can improve at the front-end.

Yahoo’s performance golden rule is: optimize front-end performance first, that’s where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent.

There are three main reasons why front-end performance is the place to start.
1.There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front-end. Cutting it in half reduces response times by 40% or more, whereas cutting back-end performance in half results in less than a 10% reduction.
2.Front-end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end projects (redesigning application architecture and code, finding and optimizing critical code paths, adding or modifying hardware, distributing databases, etc.).
3.Front-end performance tuning has been proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have reduced their end-user response times by following our performance best practices, often by 25% or more.

Only 5% of the end-user response time is spent fetching the HTML document. This result holds true for almost all web sites. In sampling the top ten U.S. websites, all but one spend less than 20% of the total response time getting the HTML document. The other 80+% of the time is spent dealing with what’s in the HTML document, namely, the front-end. That’s why the key to faster web sites is to focus on improving front-end performance.

I could go through all of the best practices which Yahoo has devised for speeding up your web site, but they’ve made a good job of it themselves, you can see the 14 golden rules here:-
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

You can also view the “High performance Websites” presentation here:-
http://www.slideshare.net/techdude/high-performance-web-sites

Yahoo have also created a Firefox add-on, that allows you to analyse any website, and grade them against each of the rules.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

So how are we taking this rules into our development process here at PlusNet?

Every developer will read the Yahoo 14 rules and our new starter guide has been updated to include this, so even though we are all aware of these rules, it will reinforce their importance.

Now reading rules is fine, but we need to put these into practice, so, every developer will optimise at least one page over the next 3 months. Whilst it would be more efficient to allocate the work to a single team, one of this programme’s goals is to up-skill all development staff.

This programme of work will contribute to faster page load times for both the customer facing aspects of our platform, together with the same sort of increased performance for all our internal tools and applications.

Learning occurs by doing, therefore as a result of what we’re doing all the development staff learn some extremely important new skills which will then be put to use by default every time they write a piece of code.

Ben Walton
Senior Developer, PlusNet

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Attendees of FOWA at the start of the month may remember the end of Paul Graham’s keynote speech about startup hubs when Ryan Carson jumped up on stage and contradicted everything Paul had just been saying — to thunderous applause! Well there’s been a bit of a back and forth since then that makes some interesting reading. More…

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On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, a bunch of us from PlusNet attended the Future of Web Apps (FoWA) conference in London. This blog entry will give a brief overview of what we saw and what we thought. I’ve hyperlinked everything in sight, so if there’s anything you’re not familiar with or want to read more, just click away…

For those who are not aware, this event is generally regarded as the UK’s (and probably Europe’s) premier event for the web app industry. Attendees descended on the venue at London Docklands from all around the world to hear from the great and the good of the web’s most successful and most innovative developers and founders.

We had speakers from Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Dogster, Plazes, Adobe, Microsoft, Feedburner, Dopplr, Dapper and lots more sharing their advice and experience with the 1000+ audience in attendance.

It was a great opportunity for the guys from PlusNet to see what’s going on out there, what up and coming technologies to look out for and to compare our own experiences with others in attendance.

I’ll not go into great detail about everything that was discussed at the conference (in a few day’s time the official FoWA website will have published each of the presentations in MP3 format for everyone to hear anyhow), but I’ll pick out a few things that were of personal interest to me.

Dapper.net and the Practical Semantic Web
The Dapper guys were continually frustrated by the lack of compliance by most websites to the ideal of the Semantic Web. If you’re not familiar, the Semantic Web is a set of design principals that will enable the ease of interoperability and accessibility of data from website to website. Read the Wikipedia article I linked to for a detailed explanation. In order to address this issue they have built some tools to enable anyone to create an API to access information from a website of their choice, manipulate the data that is extracted and then re-use it for their required purpose. Whats more, this API remains available to the community at large. Have a look at the website and I’m sure it’ll give you some ideas as to how to leverage this technology. The Dapper guys are also blogging their progress if you want to keep in touch with developments.

Daniel Burka – Creative Director from digg.com and pownce.com
This was an interesting presentation, revolving around a subject I have blogged about previously.
In June of 2007 Digg.com made some fundamental changes to the functionality of their website; changes that were made without talking to their users and changes that resulted in a user revolt. Well, on Wednesday we got to hear from the guy at Digg.com who carries full responsibility of what happened on his shoulders. It was refreshing to hear him fess-up to his mistakes and how he’s learned his lesson. Daniel Burka blogs here.. We learned many years ago that if you F-up, you need to come clean, apologise and let people know what you’re doing about it. Nobody is perfect in the world of the Internet; things go wrong, people make mistakes – it’s how you deal with it that determines how people will judge you…

Start-Ups
Many of the presenters talked about their experiences of “doing a start-up” and the lessons they had learned, be it as a result of a successful or failed venture. Paul Graham, another FoWA attendee blogs about his views on the future of start-ups.

The key message is that creating a new Internet venture today is easy; it can be very low cost and if you’re disciplined enough you can do it outside of your 9 to 5 job. Gone are the days when you needed to build your infrastructure (Amazon EC2 & XCalibre), your storage (Amazon S3), your software framework (Django), your content management software (Drupal), hire some staff (Elance) and write and distribute your press release (Pressbox). You’re adding no value to your organisation by reinventing a wheel that exists much cheaper elsewhere, that’s supported by a business dedicated to making the service work and who achieve far greater economies of scale that you could ever hope to; so outsource all that stuff and buy yourself some time to focus on your true differentiator; your idea.

Today, if you have an idea and a couple of grand in the bank you can be up and running in a few months; you don’t necessarily need a bagful of Angel and VC funding. When you can leverage a community to provide your idea with the viral marketing traction it deserves then there’s really not a great deal of barriers in the way of turning your good idea into reality and building yourself a new business. The Americans are clearly several years ahead of the UK with this mindset, but there’s really no reason why that needs to continue to be the case…

Simon Wardley delivered one of the most memorable presentations I’ve seen on this topic at FoWA. 300 Powerpoint slides in 25 minutes on Software-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service and Hardware-as-a-service and held the attention of the crowd throughout. This whole topic is something we debate at PlusNet each day. He’ll be uploading these slides to his blog in the next day or so, you can check it our here.

There’s a bunch of photos up on Flickr from this event, including many of the live filming of Diggnation that took place on the Wednesday evening.

You can also have a read of the many FoWA blogs that people have written in the last few days via the Google Blog Search facility.

All in all, a very interesting event, lots of interesting people, and a great motivator for a bunch of guys from Sheffield whose livelihood depends on this stuff. Some of us PlusNet veterens have a whole host of experience in this arena and have ridden the roller-coaster of Dotcom boom and bust and boom again and have many tales to tell from the experience. Maybe we should get one of ourselves up on stage at the next FoWA event next year and share some of these experiences…

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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Just attended the FOWD conference which is the sister conference to the Future of Web Apps (FOWA).

I would recommend looking at some of the presentations from the FOWA site. Some interesting items on there. With regard to FOWD:-

Couple of really interesting presentation. Rei from AKQA demo’d some of the work the guys at that design agency are doing re: branding online etc… Some visually impressive material which costs a fortune to build and has historically been out of the reach of small businesses etc..

However the best presentation was the one where Adobe demonstrated their soon to be released Apollo project which promises (if the Ebay example was anything to go by) to offer some very cool development functionality for web designers to self build cool web apps. You can download an alpha release at Abode site and view examples of whats possible here.

The most interesting thing for me about Apollo is that it starts to blur the distinction between online and offline apps quite nicely – and this is a technology which needs to be kept an eye on. Expect a launch date towards the end of the year and loads of buzz in the trade press / blogs on this product soon.

regards

Dean

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