Veni, Vidi, Vici Web Performance

Like every performance geek, I just came back from my 4th Conference pilgrimage. This year’s 2012 Velocity Conf was fantastic! Throughout the conference I got the feeling that people are starting to take performance more seriously than ever. Attendance was up and there were a lot of new faces alongside the veterans.

The theme this year was: Building a Faster and Stronger Web. (Steve I hope this is the last time we see you in shorts )

This was an amazing and crucial theme as it really resonates with the realities of today’s world. The web needs to get faster, stronger, and more resilient. Web pages are getting heavier and more complex day by day (ex: More CSS, more JS, more images more 3rd parties…) and as a result are now more prone to failure than ever.

More people than ever before are looking beyond code to resolve their web performance issues.

At the last WebPerf meetup in SF I was invited to speak, I used this picture to demonstrate to the attendees what really impacts performance:

I am sure I missed some other factors. But the point is that there are VERY MANY things that can impact performance, and thus the bottom line. For example just this week my Chrome browser caused a memory leak, causing my new shiny Macbook Air to have PANIC ATTACKS. Some performance issues are in your control, but the majority are not.

Some key takeaways from Velocity 2012 for me were:

• Understand Your Data by John Rauser. This guy is pure awesomeness (99th percentile awesome) An inspiration to the entire team at Catchpoint when it comes to how we deal with data in our product. (2012 Velocity Video)
• The work done by the entire Google Team. Bryan McQuade’s with the Chrome Critical Path, Pat Meenan with his SPOF detection tool (SPOF-O-Matic)
• The Yahoo! talk about Business Continuity (Frying Squirrels and Unspun Gyros), because it can be extrapolated to what we do on the web. Be prepared to fail and just work around it.
• I was also pumped that our friends from Dyn (Tom Daly) got to talk about the importance of DNS, which is something very near and dear to my heart.

See you next year!

Veni, vidi, vici Web Performance.