Slashdot Mirror


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.

9 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. excessive scripts by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    1. Re:excessive scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. Re:I did not participate by oobayly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:I did not participate by istartedi · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  4. Too much coding on the pages by Karmashock · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
    1. Re:Too much coding on the pages by sound+vision · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  5. Re:But why? by thogard · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:I did not participate by pspahn · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
  7. Re:The problem is relational databases. by plopez · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+