Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2012 – Which Website had the Best Performance?

According to IBM, Black Friday 2012 sales increased by 20%, Cyber Mondayby 30% from last year.

We monitored the web performance of 70 websites (Excluding Netflix, Blockbuster, 1800 Flowers, Scholastic, and Redcats USA ) from our US Nodes using Internet Explorer 8. The goal was to compare the performance of the sites and to see how well each website handled the traffic during the event.

This year we did not see the same issues as last year, most companies were very well prepared to handle the traffic surge. The only interesting development this year was the number of issues related to 3rd parties tags on web sites.

Date: November 20 2012 from 00:00 EDT to November 27 2012 04:00AM EDT

DNS Time:

Fastest: HSN 4 ms
Slowest: JC Penney 271 ms

Wait Time:

Fastest: Costco & Apple 4 ms
Slowest: Salt Life 1,597 ms

Response Time:

Fastest: Kohl 53 ms
Slowest: Salt Life 1,913 ms

Render Start Time:

Fastest: Buy.com 394 ms
Slowest: Salt Life 3,631 ms

Document  Complete Time:

Fastest: Walgreen 822 ms
Slowest: Barnes&Nobles: 9,782 ms

Web Page Response:

Fastest: Apple 1,405 ms
Slowest: Barnes&Nobles: 11,075 ms

Total Downloaded Bytes:

Lightest Page: Amazon Supply 266 kbytes
Heaviest Page: Lego: 7,944 kbytes

Number of Requests per Page:

Least: Amazon Supply 16 requests
Most: Barnes&Nobles 262 requests

Number of Hosts per Page:

Least: Amway 2 hosts
Most: Neiman Marcus 49 hosts

Correlation between Metrics:

Metrics Calculation: Metrics display median value.

Page Load Time: The time it takes the browser to download and render the page. This is the time when the browser states “Done” in the status bar – or the mouse changes from “Waiting” state to a pointer.

Render Start Time: The time it takes for the page to start displaying something other than white space.