Blog Listing

July 7, 2015 · by Dan Boutin
Best Practices for Performance Testing in Production
Outages. Bad user experience. Negative branding. These are three of the many reasons why performance testing in production is not only a best practice — it’s a necessity.
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July 2, 2015 · by Tom Chavez
Mobile Application Testing Checklist: The Top 5 Test Conditions
Every day, new mobile applications are rolled out by an increasing number of businesses and organizations. In order for these apps to be successful in the marketplace, they must be tested to ensure that they offer the best possible experience for end users. Here are some of the top considerations for mobile app testing. The Rise of Mobile Apps |...
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June 11, 2015 · by Tammy Everts
Page Bloat: The Average Web Page Size Is More than 2MB
I’ve been tracking the typical web page weight and composition of the top million websites (thanks to the HTTP Archive) since 2011. Back in 2012, it was huge news when the average page exceeded 1 MB. At the time, people were incredulous…and even outraged. And they almost immediately began to speculate about when the average page would crack the 2 MB barrier. It looks like the speculation can end now.
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June 9, 2015 · by Akamai Developer
Here’s Why More Bandwidth Isn’t a Magic Bullet for Web Performance
One of the most common arguments I hear when people rationalize why things like page bloat aren’t that big a performance issue is that ever-evolving networks mitigate the impact. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate that increasing bandwidth up to 1233% makes pages just 55% faster — meaning that faster networks aren’t the performance cure-all that some folks assume they are.
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May 20, 2015 · by Nic Jansma
How-To: Provide Real User Monitoring for Single-Page Applications
Apps built with AngularJS provide an interesting challenge for real user monitoring (RUM) solutions. Here’s how we overcame those challenges at SOASTA. AngularJS is a modern web development framework that is fast becoming one of today’s most popular tools for web developers. Sites built with frameworks like AngularJS live in the category of “single-page applications” (SPAs). One of the core...
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April 29, 2015 · by Tammy Everts
Performance Monitoring 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Synthetic and Real User Monitoring
Just like there’s no one-size-fits-all measurement tool in my kitchen, there’s no miraculous all-purpose tool for measuring the performance of your website. But that’s okay.
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July 7, 2013 · by Nic Jansma
Improving Single Page Application Monitoring with Boomerang
We’ve learned a lot from our customers and how they are building their single page apps (SPAs). Many of our monitoring improvements are being driven by the variety of websites that our customers are building, using everything from do-it-yourself templating engines to full-blown frameworks such as Angular, Backbone.js, Ember.js, or React. There are two key things we’ve learned, which have...
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June 22, 2013 · by Philip Tellis
Setting Up SSL on nginx for Performance and Security
At WebPerfDays Silicon Valley 2013 we ended up with an intense debate about the usefulness of SSL vs. the performance of SSL. The primary problem seemed to be that there was no simple, step-by-step guide on how to set up SSL correctly. Now, I’m no expert on SSL performance, but I did have to learn how to set SSL up...
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December 12, 2012 · by Philip Tellis
The Non-Blocking Script Loader Pattern
Way back when, in the early days of web performance (ca. 2005), the suggested way to embed third-party scripts in web pages was to use a straight up <script> node. This was simple, and what happened next was deterministic. The rest of the page blocked until this script node had loaded and executed. <html> <head> <script src="http://some.site.com/script.js"></script> <!-- And now...
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September 27, 2012 · by Philip Tellis
Linux TCP/IP Tuning for Scalability
We’re a web performance company, and performance and scalability go hand in hand. Better scalability results in more consistent performance and at Akamai, we like pushing our hardware as far as it will go. Today’s post is about some of the infrastructure we use and how we tune it to handle a large number of requests. We have separate components...
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