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Google Shares Insights On Accelerating Web Sites
miller60 writes "The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and includes 320 KB of content, according to Google executive Urs Holzle. In his keynote at the O'Reilly Velocity conference on web performance, Holzle said that competition from Chrome has made Internet Explorer and Firefox faster. He also cited the potential for refinements to TCP, DNS, and SSL/TLS to make the web a much faster place, and cited compressing headers as a powerful performance booster. Holzle also noted that Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly."
If only Slashdot loaded faster I could have had my first post!
Now if only every website didn't include 300kb of Javascript libraries that I had to download.
That's what noscript is for. With noscript, your browser doesn't even download the .js files.
How many times will their crawler check a slowly loading website before they penalizes it?
"Human kind cannot bear very much reality" ~T.S. Eliot
I find my browsing goes faster if I just yell at my housemate to stop downloading torrents that are *ahem* 'Barely Legal'.
I saw my browser waiting on google-analytics.com quite often before I started using No-Script.
Why do sites put up with an AD server/analytics service that slows down a site by a large amount?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
This really begs the question of what it tries to load. If it simply loads the html, then JavaScript laden sites and Flash sites will have the edge over simple information sites that serve dynamic content. However, if they load all referenced content, then the reverse may be true.
I would like it if the latter were true. What could be better than every Flash site being seen as a large bundle of data that simply displays "This site requires Flash". When I surf the web, I surf for content, not pretty pictures. In my opinion, if a site can't simultaniously be surfed in Lynx, read in Braille, and parsed with a spider, then it really isn't a web site.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. My initial response was a happy one, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to be unnecessarily discriminating against those who are too far away from the bleeding edge. Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough? And where are we drawing the line between 'fast' and 'slow'?
There's no inherent reason that Java should be slow. I run a discussion site (linked in my sig) that's running off an all-java codebase, and while it has occasional load issues. We can render the content for the front page of the site in 20 ms or less (it's at the bottom of the page if you are curious). Java has a proper application model, so with smart use of singletons you can effectively keep the entire working set of a forum site in memory. Our performance is much poorer if you start browsing through archives, but that makes up a tiny percentage of our page views.
That would make google search results bad right. When I search I want the site with the best information. Not the one that loads fastest.
"He also cited the potential for refinements to TCP, DNS, and SSL/TLS to make the web a much faster place"
The core Internet protocol and infrastructure was and remains a conduit of innovation /because/ it is agnostic to HTTP and all other protocols. Optimizing for one small subset of its protocols and for a single kind of contemporary usage would discourage all kinds of innovation using protocols we've not conceived yet, and would be the single largest setback the modern Internet has seen.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
java really really only has problems with startup time (that a web spider will never see) and the delay when a servlet|jsp is hit the first time. While doing web development, we see that startup and first load most of the time, giving an appearance of slowness, but it is much better on a production server with regular traffic.
Most real-world page load delay today seems to be associated with advertising. Merely loading the initial content usually isn't too bad, although "content-management systems" can make it much worse, as overloaded databases struggle to "customize" the content. "Web 2.0" wasn't a win; pulling in all those big CSS and JavaScript libraries doesn't help load times.
We do some measurement in this area, as SiteTruth reads through sites trying to find a street address on each site rated. We never read more than 21 pages from a site, and for most sites, we can find a street address within 45 seconds, following links likely to lead to contact information. Only a few percent of sites go over 45 seconds for all those pages. Excessively slow sites tried recently include "directserv.org" (a link farm full of ads), "www.w3.org" (embarrassing), and "religioustolerance.org" (an underfunded nonprofit). We're not loading images, ads, Javascript, or CSS; that's pure page load delay. It's not that much of a problem, and we're seeing less of it than we did two years ago.
Speed is relevant because crap mirror sites should be ranked lower than the originating site. [Or even vice versa, faster mirrors should be preferred over the original source]
You seem to be under the delusion that Google is just going to delete slow sites, or return results purely on speed regardless of content. I have no idea what could lead you to think this way (well, I do "knee jerk reaction") because as far as I can tell, the most relevant site will be preferred but if there are multiple sites that are approximately all around the same relevance, the faster one is preferred.
Sounds like an excellent idea to me, lord knows that I've been pissed off waiting 45 seconds for a page to load when the next result loads instantly with similar information.
Holzle said that competition from Chrome has made Internet Explorer and Firefox faster.
Bull. Back when IE and Firefox's last major releases came out, Chrome was a tiny drop in the bucket market-share-wise. January was the first time it passed Safari in marketshare. I think it's more accurate to say that competition in general has led to companies improving their browsers. I'd bet we could also attribute the performance improvements to better standards compliance by websites, since there are now so many mainstream browsers.
I'd say that Firefox vs IE competition (and Firefox vs Safari on the mac) have inspired the improvements...
Please help metamoderate.
Where are the measuring *from*?
I've moved a site from Linode New Jersey to Linode London, UK because the target audience are in London ( http://www.lfgss.com/ ).
However in Google Webmaster Tools the page load time increased, suggesting that the measurements are being calculated from US datacentres, even though for the target audience the speed increased and page load time decreased.
I would like to see Google use the geographic target preference and to have the nearest datacentre to the target be the one that performs the measurement... or better still to have both a local and remote datacentre perform every measurement and then find a weighted time between them that might reflect real-world usage.
Otherwise if I'm being sent the message that I am being penalised for not hosting close to a Google datacentre from where the measurements are calculated, then I will end up moving there in spite of the fact that this isn't the right thing for my users.
Noscript doesn't turn off Javascript. Most browsers already have an option for that. What Noscript does is to make the control of Javascript (and Flash) much more fine grained and convenient.
Some typical case:
1. Scripts on poor web sites just serve to detract from the content. Those you simply never turn on.
2. Scripts on good web sites improve access to content. Those sites you enable permanently first time you visit (press no Noscript button in the lower right corner, and select "enable permanently") and forget about it.
3. Some web sites contain a mix of the two. Here you can either explicitly enable a specific object (by clicking on a placeholder, like with flashblock), or temporarily enable scripts for that site.
Basically, Noscript makes more, not less, of the web accessible. The good web sites you use normally will not be affected (as they all will be allowed to run scripts). But following links from social web sites like /. become a much more pleasant experience.
Of course, most of the noise scripts distacting from content are ads, so AdBlock gives you much of the same benefit. But I don't want to hide ads, as that is how the sites pay their bills.
Right, because how could Java possibly hope to compete with the blazing speeds of PHP and Ruby?
sic transit gloria mundi
If you're not going to be clicking adverts, I am sure it costs nobody money. It just costs them bandwidth. The adworld is mostly CPC/PPC.
Content websites seem to think that if I do not block an advert, I will actually click it. That is ridiculous!
My principle is that advertising is like a bribe, they paid to put it in my face. That is a product I have no interest in. I will learn about products when I have a need for them.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Wait, they put up a sign welcoming the whole world to come into their house, and then you're saying it's their moral right to then complain if you don't look at the ads on the walls of their house as payment? There was no contract or agreement in place prior to my entering their house, just an open invitation - if this is a pre-requisite they should display at the very least a click through agreement that this is the understanding. I say this as someone who doesn't disable ads (because I do support a free web and for me it's easy to just ignore ads, I mentally filter them out and if the site gets some benefit by my not physically filtering them out, all power to them), but unless you're making it part of an explicit contract that you will only allow free views in exchange for enabling ads you have no right to complain when someone follows a link to your site with adblock/noscript enabled. If you don't like it, don't accept incoming links, set up a login system and enforce a policy that accounts will be deleted if ads are disabled - then sit back and enjoy your very quiet life on the web...
Actually you're dead wrong, because ads don't just track click-throughs, they can also track impressions. If I visit a site with an ad for product X, and then two days later I go buy product X, there is a model which will see the original site owner rewarded, even though there was a disjoint between me seeing the ad and buying the product. The amount will likely be much less than a direct click-through-purchase model, but nevertheless it recognises the cumulative effect of having seen the ad in a few places before deciding to purchase.
It doesn't give them money Dave, if I do not click an advert (click) and do not buy the product referenced in the advert (impression)...
They get nothing.
Are you a content producer by any chance?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
It's people using AdBlock that cause sites to have annoying adverts in the first place.
That is simply false. In fact, reality is exactly the opposite: It’s the sites having annoying adverts that cause people to use AdBlock in the first place.
Annoying advertisements (particularly annoying, the blinking animated gif ones) have been around at least since when I was first starting to surf the web back in the days of Netscape Navigator 2. AdBlock was pretty much unheard of back then, which meant I had no choice but to look at Flash ads for fungal foot cremes on my Hotmail account.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.