Black Friday '14: E-commerce Pages Far Slower Than They Were in 2013

An anonymous reader writes Black Friday news kicked off this weekend quite early when Best Buy was hit with a massive outage, but it turns out that was only half the story. The top 50 e-commerce websites were slower overall this year compared to last, suggesting customers were frustrated even if they could get to their favorite shopping site. Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint Systems looked at aggregate performance this weekend and compared it to the same timeframe in 2013. The results are notable: desktop web pages were 19.85 percent slower, while mobile web pages were a whopping 57.21 percent slower.

Comments

I did not participate

[SternisheFan]

I don't think a big screen is worth dying for.

Re:I did not participate

[oobayly]

It's only a bargain if you actually need it - not my words, but I did think along the same lines when I was watching the mayhem.

Black Friday scuffles: 'I got a Dyson but I don’t even know if I want it'

Frustrated with not being able to buy a Blaupunkt 40” TV reduced from £299.99 to £149.99, Haggerty rushed to pick up a Dyson Animal Vac, down from £319.99 to £159.99. “I don’t even know how much it costs, I don’t know even know if I’m going to buy it. I just wanted something,” she said. “There are lads in there three, four, five tellies. It’s not fair.”

One of those lads was Andy Blackett, 30, an estate agent, who had two trolleys full of bargains. “I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you the prices, but I know they’re bargains.”

Makes me proud of the country I live in.

Re:I did not participate

[istartedi]

Jesus died for your sins. The least you can do is die for a TV. /sarc.

Re:I did not participate

[Skarjak]

What a bunch of fucking morons. Meanwhile here I am reading reviews online to figure out which brand of rechargeable batteries to buy. I want to make sure this ~20$ purchase is the right one. Guess I'm a bad consumer.

P.S.: It's the Eneloops, apparently.

Re:I did not participate

[plover]

Clicking "buy now with 1-click" is rarely fatal.

Or did you mean that you didn't participate in the brick and mortar competitive fracas, which has nothing to do with the response times of web pages, which is what TFA is actually about? Even reading enough of the article title to post what you wrote indicates the story is about web pages, which you can't "die for".

Re:I did not participate

[pspahn]

Those Onion articles always crack me up. It's hilarious how close their satire comes to reality ... it's ... erh ... oh.

Re:I did not participate

[wiredlogic]

On the bright side it's nice to have the reassurance that dumb people aren't exclusive to the US.

Re:But why?

[The New Guy 2.0]

I think it's because FIOS, U-Verse, and Google Fiber all had good years worth of picking up subscribers, so customers want their pages faster and the server-side people didn't upgrade.

excessive scripts

[whoever57]

Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.

Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

Re:excessive scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

And redirects fifteen deep to other sites to serve adds ....

Re:excessive scripts

[LordLucless]

The javascript on the primary site I work on takes up about 50% of the page load time. None of it is to do with functionality - it's all analytics or A/B tests or performance measuring stuff. One day something broke with the tool the marketing guys use to insert all that guff, and the site performance doubled. Inspect the DOM tree after it's loaded, and there's 30-50 iframes and script tags that have been dynamically inserted on any given page.

I'm not against javascript; it's useful for making sites do useful things. But this sort of crap just drags everything down.

Re:excessive scripts

[Razed By TV]

At the risk of sounding like a luddite:
Off and on I will think about how people want to treat the internet as a utility. We try to conserve water, we try to conserve electricity, we are metered for these. For phones, we pay for minutes, though you can opt for unlimited plans, and the infrastructure is such that unlimited plans don't burden others. For cars, we have gasoline (though technically not a utility), and when gas is cheap, people buy larger vehicles. When the price of gas goes up, people become concerned about gas efficiency.

Noone is terribly concerned about "conserving" the internet, or conserving computer resources. Every year computers get faster, and every year websites get less efficient. More bloat, bigger images, more script nonsense. They find more ways to update the browser, to make it smarter and yet more bloated. My NoScript and RequestPolicy plugins are so laden with websites that aren't obviously related to the one I'm on. If I'm lucky, there are one or two sites with a related name, or a CDN, and I can allow these and continue on. If not, I sometimes temporarily allow all, sick of going down the rabbit hole and just wanting to get to my destination.

I'm sure there is an electricity cost related to the extra computing. The time required for page loads is simply time you've wasted, unless you have managed to multitask a few pages. A site taking 15 seconds more than it did a year ago isn't a lot one time, but it adds up page after page, day after day. Even mobile versions of sites, using 4G services, load slower than they did years ago.

I just want my information, I want it simple, and I want it now. I'm sick of all this crap that is designed to make my life better somehow. I liked my life the way it was. I liked being able to do Verbatim searches on Google and actually getting verbatim results. I don't need fancy maps that take 10 times as long to load, I need simple maps that work fast when the network is congested. I don't need functionality changes to make things look slicker. I want to be able to do more with the hardware I have, and we just keep going in the opposite direction.

Re:excessive scripts

[pooh666]

It isn't the amount, as much as the complexity and the number of different vendors, programmers, companies that are represented. The post a way's up blaming "tracking" is way oversimplified and hitting the wrong issue. How do you debug a page for performance AND MAKE ANY CHANGES, if much of the code you didn't write and you can't change?

Re:excessive scripts

[tlhIngan]

Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.

Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

The problem is that developer PCs are often some of the most powerful in the company because they are developers and can demand it. I mean, give a developer, web or otherwise a bog standard PC with less RAM that "average" people have and you'll get nothing but an endless stream of complaints.

So yeah, web developers with Haswell 3.5GHz i7s and 16/32GB of RAM designing webpages. yeah, it loads fast, but bogs down someone with a 4 year old PC and barely 4GB of RAM.

Then there's all the preparation for traffic - yeah, they get all the static CDNs up and running, the database servers are beefed up and the dynamic servers are beefy. Then they forget one script they have on every page references some dinky little server everyone forgot about. That server keels over and the page coding is such that the browser isn't able to render the rest of the page while loading it in the background. So now the pages load slower and slower and slower and everyone thinks it's either the static CDNs, the database or the dynamic views being generated, and not the server handling that one script which is vastly underpowered because it's hidden in the corner of the datacentre and forgotten about.

Re:The problem is relational databases.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Instead, we need database technology that is new hat. This database technology already exists, and they're called array databases.

Array databases are web scale!.

Too much coding on the pages

[Karmashock]

More of the coding needs to be server side or not exist at all.

The worst is the ads. I turned on NoScript and so many pages just fly now because the stupid javascript isn't allowed to run.

Re:Too much coding on the pages

[sound vision]

I recently installed NoScript for security reasons, but I was glad to find the speed improvements too. Also, the NoScript's domain list has shed some light on how many scripts really are on some of these web pages. They have their own scripts, plus several social networking sites, random CDNs, Google analytics, a couple of ad services... Then you hit "temporarily allow all scripts" and the NoScript list shows even more domains and you realize the scripts are being chain-loaded. Some of these sites end up with 25 domains listed. That means you are waiting on 25 servers to respond, 25 DNS lookups, before the scripts even get to executing, which is even worse.

Re:But why?

[thogard]

Page load times are down because pages are loading so many more tracking options and some of them are very abusive on the javascript engines. If you turn on the status line (even if you can as it is gone in some modern browsers), you will often see it saying "loading 159 out of 162" and those last ones never load. There is also something that is related to a compounding latency problem that many developers don't think about it because they don't see it when they are developing the platforms and modern tool kits help to hide it from developers too.

I guess people don't like IBM's old work on the subject that showed dropping a 3 second response to just 2 seconds resulted in substantial improved efficiency. Maybe marketing groups need to understand that a customer stuck on a slow site is a bad consumer.

Re:The problem is relational databases.

[plopez]

I am glad you posted that. I am putting together a little project I call Distributed Integrated Scalable Array Database, DISArray. It will be a shardable web scale instantly consistent DB engine which will have kick ass performance and a Heisenberg query engine support by a look ahead design I have code named "Schroedinger".

Now all I need a is cool mascot and I will be well on my way to becoming a bazillionaire. Zuckerberg better watch out! Look for it on GitHub.

Re:But why?

[pooh666]

I don't know how this got moded up, it is nonsense. Most tracking happens post load/post interactive, and someone saying, "looking at your status line" is a telltale for this person not having a clue about website performance opt. I get this from JS devs and PM's all of the time, and I really do have to prove that the 1M of badly optimized images is more the problem.