Posts Tagged ‘Technology/Internet

A couple of weeks ago, I moved my mobile life back to a Blackberry Bold 9700 from T-Mobile after being on a Dash 3G  for the last 6 months.
It’s like breathing air again.
Admittedly, I am not the typical modern smartphone user. I prefer a full keyboard over a touchscreen, and I still operate in a [...]

Helping a colleague this week, we uncovered some odd behavior with a site whose performance he was analyzing. Upon first glance, it was clear that this site had a performance issue – they had HTTP persistence disabled. Immediate red flag in the areas of network overhead and geographic latency.
Further digging exposed something more sinister. It [...]

The title is a question I ask because I hear so many different views and perspectives about HTTP compression from the people I work with, colleagues and customers alike.
There appears to be no absolute statement about the compression capabilities of all current (or in-use) browsers anywhere on the Web.
My standard line is: If your customers [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

When it comes to the T-Mobile Dash 3G, I have some simple advice.
Don’t.
The longer I have this phone, the more of a clunker it becomes. My list of complaints include:

In the last 24 hours, the battery has started to drain for no apparent reason – and yes, WiFi, Bluetooth, and background apps are all off. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The moment a Web site goes live, the publishers lose control of the performance.
When I say lose control of the performance, I mean that despite everything that has been done to ensure scalability and capacity, the Web is inherently an infrastructure that is out of anyone’s direct ability to manage.
This is something that needs to [...]


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