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Dear Friend,

Website conjures up many dreams for various groups in the department. Sales dreams of higher sales, Marketing dreams of higher reach, lower cost of sales, Customer Service dreams of reduced customer service costs and increased customer satisfaction. Many of these dreams can remain dreams if the website has design and performance issues. I personally am aware of corporations where 2% of their customers every month, used their website once and never returned. Investigation revealed that for website performance was the reason behind it. Discussions with the IT team had the networking group, application groups, security groups and the data center teams at loggerheads, with no resolution available to the business.

How does IT go about identifying where the problem is and how do we fix it? It is very challenging, but a doable task provided appropriate methodologies are followed. To learn more about unraveling the mysteries behind your websites performance, read the below article from our performance experts.

Chief Executive Officer

Is my website performing as well as it used to when it was launched? Is it able to take the load it has been planned for? Is it robust enough to be available 24 x 7? Am I losing customers because the end user experience does not compare to that of my competitor sites? These are some questions that keep the Web site managers awake. Research tells us that 46% of customers have shifted to competitor sites because of IT failures or performance related issues. The web customer has low tolerance for site failures and even a perception of inadequate performance can erode his loyalty.

Performance issues assume higher criticality in a "portal" scenario, where there is little differentiation by way of service offering or business value; site performance itself could become the differentiator. Thus, it is important that a website be geared to perform at the start and be at its feet on a continuous basis. This calls for accurate and continuous web performance measurement.

Given its value to business, complexities of technologies involved and the quality of information required, web performance measurement no longer remains an option and an easy task to perform.

What should web performance measurement deliver?

Web performance measurement should be able to:

• Give a complete picture
• Measure user experience
• Isolate performance bottlenecks
• Proactively manage the application
• Provide customer analytic information
• Prompt with alerts
  

Measurement Principles

In order that the measurement provides maximum information, there are two important principles to be considered. These are:

• Performance Isolation

  Degradation in performance can be due to any of the system, network, application, database and content components involved in a web transaction. It is important that the tests carried out indicate the precise component so that remedial measures can be taken at the earliest. E.g. a page load time would comprise of DNS lookup, connect time to the server, database fetches, image fetches, ad server fetches, etc. And each page would normally have graphics, texts, animation's, ads, links from third party sites, number of disk accesses, etc.
  

• Point of observation
  

  Information on performance can be elicited by two different ways:

  • Agents at network peering points and IDC: This gives vital information about the path taken by the data packets between the client and the web server. Agents placed at peering points time-stamp the packets as they pass and help capture traffic related information.
  • Building intelligence at the source: The source could be the browser or cookies at the client machine. This helps capture all data about the user sessions and preferences.

To get the complete picture of user and traffic information and system performance, a combination of the above two need to be used. Tests should be carried out from

• The IDC at the entry point into the Internet to get an idea of the application performance to answer, "How good is the application performance?"
• User-ends under all-possible technical and human environments to get an idea of the end user experience about the site performance

Where could the bottlenecks be?

The performance of any site is a complex interplay of all components of the web infrastructure i.e., systems, network and applications. A site performance issue may have its root in any of the following:

• Web Application Architecture
• Database design
• Server Capacity
• Data Center Infrastructure
• Bandwidth available from Data Center
• Traffic patterns

What are the possible solutions?

Based on the problem area identified, the possible solution could be any one or a combination of the following:

• Increase Internet Bandwidth after a "Re-sizing Exercise"
• Increase Server Capacity after a "Re-assign Exercise"
• Re-architect Web Application Architecture and Layering e.g., content and text separation, separate box for mail server, dedicated chat server, etc.
• Re-architect Database Interactions and Structure - change in indexing mechanism, create views for multi-table frequently accessed information
• Increase Number of Servers & Introduce Intra-Data Center Load Balancing - for redundancy and functional division of application
• Cache at ISP/IDC locally in India - With the site continuing to be at the present data-center, caching for images and other content could improve the site performance for an India-centric website. There will be a need to identify availability and SLAs from various players in India
• Mirror at ISP/IDC locally in India - site mirroring could be looked at as a possibility
• Change the data center at which the site is hosted

How do I ensure 24 x 7 x 365 performance?

The website is your business and its imperative for your website to be up on a 24 x 7 for your business to be successful. On an ongoing basis, the following need to be monitored to maintain the performance of a website:

• Uptime of Web Infrastructure - requires monitoring, management, fault isolation, vendor coordination of every infrastructure (system, network and application) component.
• Web Performance/Diagnostics - required to measure/monitor "user-experience" so as to know that given the user environment what can be done to improve the performance of the site.
• Security Management - to reduce chances of malicious "hack-in"
• Benchmarking results/reports - Performance stats of website versus others would be required.
• On-site management - Services required for Admin (System and Network): Install patches, OS version upgrades, Bug fixes, etc., as provided by various vendors needs to be implemented.
• Business Intelligence from mapping traffic/browsing patterns of clients.
• User demographic information - to exactly know the types and preferences of the users so that the functional and content offerings of the website can be tailored.