Ben Rushlo was on IT Conversations partially to promote his company’s tool (KITE) but they also talked about performance testing and measurement in general.

  • Don’t think of performance in terms of pages, but transactions
  • Not all parts of a site have he same performance requirements
  • Performance is relative to your location
  • Real browsers replicate real users (as compared to just raw http)
  • For high-speed users, the size of page or elements doesn’t matter. It is all about the number of round trips. Even if you use a CDN, you have to go out to the network to get to the CDN.
  • You can optimize for first-time users, or return users. But do you know enough about them to make the tradeoffs that are necessary?
  • Caching is good, but good design upfront is better
  • Good design is not just about the user, but helps the bottom-line of the company
  • Does your website handle the situation where a third-party provider is down (ads, analytics, etc.)
  • Do you have an SLA with your third-party?
  • Is your third-party component more important than the reason the customer is at the site
  • Do you know what all the calls on your page to third-parties are doing?
  • You can’t post-engineer performance into sites anymore, the way you could 5 years ago