June 22, 2011

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Speed

This post is not about a 55 MPH bus or Keanu Reeves (…Bodie!!). Sorry to disappoint.

I used to subscribe to the idea that “speed is a feature.” That aphorism is used to imply that making your web app load and run faster is a competitive advantage, akin to having better features. Now I find that aphorism to be a gross understatement. Speed is far more important than tag clouds, printable formatting, syntax highlighting, or any combination of features one might see on a product manager’s build schedule.

I often use a plain text editor (Notepad++) over a fancier word processor because it’s faster. I’ll give up the myriad of features Word offers in order to load the app 2 seconds faster.

Gmail is in the doghouse for me right now because of the countless loading bars I spend all day watching crawl. If I could pay Google $20/mo ($40? $100? What will it take?) for a guaranteed SLA on inbox load speed, I’d do it without blinking. Odd that Gmail is so slow considering how blazingly fast google.com is. Google has proven repeatedly that there’s an inverse correlation between page load time and usage, I’ll cite their data when I’m back on a computer tomorrow (thumbing out this post on an iPhone).

Web frameworks have made it incredibly easy for developers to build new apps, but it usually takes startups years to truly optimize those frameworks (or often completely rewrite many of the backend layers of abstraction) to make them run as fast as Google or Facebook.

I’ve been learning more about tools developers can use to speed up their apps. There are a number of diagnostic tools that help developers figure out what parts of their app are slow, but very few tools I’ve seen actually automate the process of fixing speed issues. Im not expecting some magic solution that turns clunky backend Ruby into highly optimized C code, but does anyone have any recommendations of apps that automate the process of optimizing a web app for speed?

Comments (View) and 73 notes

73 notes

  1. istoselidon2f reblogged this from thegongshow
  2. innonate reblogged this from thegongshow and added:
    feature. Milliseconds count.
  3. mlcarvajal reblogged this from thegongshow
  4. This was featured in #Tech
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