Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Few months back, Keynote announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.
IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their site performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.
Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways Learn More

Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Source: Keynote Systems

Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud

In this blog, we are going to talk about metrics to build into service level agreements and learn how to track the quality of service users of SaaS and cloud applications actually experience.

Q&A With Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management and Corporate Development, Keynote Systems

Phil Waineright: I’m glad to have you with us because your — Keynote — is a SaaS provider itself, but you also actually work with SaaS and cloud companies who make use of your services, don’t you?

Vik Chaudhary: That’s right. In fact we do both. We started out as a cloud company and a SaaS company, well before those words were even invented, back 14 years ago. And today, we work with about 2800 different companies all over the world; SaaS companies are among them.

Phil Waineright: Right. So okay. So this part of the business is serving traditional enterprise businesses but part — a growing part I suppose of the business — is serving the cloud vendor community of one type or another.

Vik Chaudhary: As it turns out, the cloud vendor community is — especially in the SaaS world — is growing to include businesses that are using SaaS vendors very effectively. And because businesses typically care about their online performance and customer experience, they happen to look to us to help moderate the conversation between them and the SaaS providers so we can assure that performance and reliability of their applications are really top-notch.

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Web Application Performance Measurement and Tuning

To combat the growing problem of poor web application performance and safeguard the rising amount of business revenue gained via online channels, load testing strategies, tools and services have experienced a transformation in terms of both awareness and adoption.

Business requirements for web application load testing and application performance testing as a means for ongoing performance measurement and tuning have become more rigorous over the past several years.

Measurements derived with load testing tools should provide a clear understanding of where performance bottlenecks reside and aid in infrastructure and capacity planning of computing resources. When derived from meaningful load tests, results serve as a guide to helping IT staff make informed decisions about the performance of their applications and infrastructures.

A solid load testing strategy must complement performance monitoring and analysis in a production environment and, in turn, production monitoring and analysis should be leveraged to improve the accuracy of load tests.

Read More on Enterprise Load Testing for Web Applications.

Challenges And Surprises With Web Load Testing

To gauge a Web site’s capacity and scalability, web load testing is one of the most effective ways. But the load tests need to simulate real scenarios. The huge numbers and ranges of variables involved in Web site load testing will always present challenges and surprises.

A load testing scenario can be made significantly more realistic by simulating the behavior of tolerant and

an intolerant user. Familiarity is a major factor in how quickly a simulated user navigates from one page to the next. As with latency tolerance, different people will behave in different ways: users that are very familiar with the Web site move more rapidly (therefore creating more load per unit of time) than users who are visiting the Web site for the first time and need to read and understand how the Web site is organized to go from one page to the next.

You can also run simple in-house experiments using employees and their friends and family to determine, for example, the page viewing time differences between new and returning users.

Read More on Web Based Testing and Website Monitoring. 

Improving Website Responsiveness Involves Tradeoffs

It is easy for a measurement tool to sit on a server and measure all requests for service—and this kind of measurement has its uses, especially when load testing or investigating bottlenecks. But because of the variety of implementation possibilities, a common problem when measuring RIAs is that related requests may appear to originate from separate units of work on the client.

Correlating seemingly separate measurements with a particular application activity, task, or phase is tricky. The more complex the client/server relationship, especially when it involves concurrent interactions, the harder it becomes for measurement and analysis tools to perform that correlation properly.

Having more design and implementation options also creates new opportunities for developers to make performance-related mistakes. Accidentally or deliberately, developers can implement “chatty” client/server communication styles that perform extremely slowly under some workload conditions. Even with thorough testing, some of these problems may remain undiscovered until after the application is deployed unless applications are subjected to a systematic SLM process that includes measurement
activities to identify, investigate, and fix them.

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Measuring Streaming Media Performance From The Customer Perspective

Along with the growth, however, have come significant challenges as streaming media points out to corporations and individuals the limits of their information infrastructure. These limits crash against the users’ demands for smooth video, clear audio, and performance levels specified and guaranteed by contract. Media providers seeking to provide consistent quality of service face a daunting array of web performance issues, caused by lack of last-mile broadband build-out to service interruptions and carrier quality of service problems.

One key to dealing with quality of service issues is accurately measuring streaming media website performance from the customer perspective. With the lack of industry standardization, customer confidence rests on providing information from a trusted source.

Unrealistic Load Testing Leads To Unrealistic Inferences

Website need to be tested under the most realistic conditions. These tests should be done using the arrival rates based on actual web logs and a real user – true to life scenario. This will help determine the revenue potential.

Earlier tests might have been conducted within your environment. But website performance testing would only be effective if conducted where the end users are. Unrealistic load testing leads to unrealistic inferences.  You will need true visibility into your end-user experience ensuring the success of your online business.

A big discrepancy in the page response times from different locations may point to the latency issues related to some backbones or the ten worst performing pages as the load level is increased indicating the pages causing performance bottlenecks.