Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Steve Souders is the current king of Web performance gurus. His mantra, which is sound and can be borne out by empirical evidence, is that 80% of performance issues occur between the Web server and the Web browser. He offers a fantastically detailed methodology for approaching these issues.
But fixing the 80% of performance issues that [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

One of the traditional areas of frustration for Operations and Development teams in the Web world is that their performance, Web performance, is measured from the outside-in.
The resistance of this camp is strong, and they will appear without warning, even from amongst the most enlightened of companies.
How can they be recognized?
You will hear their battle-cry, [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

A hallway conversation this morning brought up a very interesting point about the relationship between Web performance measurements and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). When choosing between a Web performance measurement solution and a CDN, which service should come first?
Companies facing dire and obvious Web performance issues will want immediate results, leading them to fall into [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

Every so often, you wake up and realize that the world has changed around you. Or, to say it better, your view of the world has changed so profoundly, but also so subtly and slowly that it is imperceptible unless you take the time to look back at where you came from.
Six years ago, if [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

It’s a rare Web site these days that hosts all of its own content. From the smallest blog to the largest retailer, Web sites farm out their images, streams, and pages to CDNs, and absorb feeds, ads, and data streams from any number of outside providers.
Effective Web performance demands that a site take responsibility for [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

A quote from Avinash Kaushik (Occam’s Razor and @avinashkaushik) to start this post.
I have a 10/90 rule . If your budget is $100 then spend $10 on tools and professional services to implement them, and spend $90 on hiring people to analyze data you collect on your website.
The web is quite complex, you are going [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

In the rush to the mobile computing era, what is often lost by advocates of this technology are the actual needs of the modern mobile consumer. Do most users need to have a handheld computer with them at all times? Is that what they desire? What does the market say?
In March 2009, 23% of mobile [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

Web performance is everywhere. People intuitively understand that when a site is slow, something’s wrong. Web performance breeds anecdotal tales of lost carts, broken catalogs, and searches gone wrong. Web performance can get you name in lights, but not in the way you or your company would like.
It’s a mistake to consider Web performance a [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

I have been monitoring this trend for a couple of weeks to see if it remained constant, and it appears to be a real thing. Since the end of May 2009, Internet Explorer 7’s browser share in the US has collapsed, with a requisite increase in the use of Firefox 3.0.

This is a staggering change. [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

Last Tuesday, I created a Windows 7 RC virtual machine for VMWare Fusion. As a fairly technical user of operating systems and the like, our internal IT department figured that I would be the right person to put this new OS through its paces.
Unlike a lot of people who are using Windows 7 and commenting [...]

Spread the Love:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • Netvouz
  • Identi.ca
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • email

About this blog

Stephen Pierzchala is one of a 10-year veteran of the Web performance field who also writes on topics that interest his non-linear world-view.

Contact

stephen@pierzchala.com

+1 (508) 410-3865