launchpad development
System Performance
This page is home for the Foundations Team's work towards improving the performance of Launchpad.net.
One of the Foundations team's current initiatives (first half of 2010) is to improve systemic performance. This section of the wiki has documentation of the associated experiments and projects.
The following is research collected by Maris Fogels describing the methodology we are using to look at page performance, and the low-level analysis of the approaches we have considered and how they relate to the results we have gathered.
/MeasuringPagePerformance: Tools and techniques for measuring page load performance
/ImprovingPageLoadPerformance: Ideas and numbers for faster page load times
A very high-level summary is the following.
We think of Launchpad's systemic performance in terms of Time to Interact, or TTI.
TTI has three components: network traffic, including SSL handshaking; page generation on the server; and browser rendering, including JS processing. For Launchpad, a rough guideline is that these three each account for XX%, YY%, and ZZ% respectively. (mars indicates this is roughly divided in three. Challenge: should this be more like 50%, 50%, 0%? --gary)
We have special users we care about: authenticated users are particularly important to us. and users on FF, WebKit (Safari and Chrome), and IE are all important to us. IE represents a small fraction of our user base, but OEM makers and other important corporate users sometimes are forced to use only IE.
On the basis of that analysis, we have identified the following bigger projects to tackle to improve performance.
XXX for all of below
- SSL
- IE and better cacheing on browser
- cacheing of page elements (memcached discussion goes here)
- Chameleon
