

Tumblr wins because it's twice as fast - jrosoff
http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/09/the-web-performance-impact-tumblr-leaves-competition-in-the-dust/

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pyrmont
This is a terrible article.

The bald assertion that Tumblr is more successful than Posterous because it is
faster is repeated about a half dozen times during the piece but no evidence
is ever advanced to prove this point.

Without further data, at best, we're talking a correlation. I could similarly
argue that dropping the 'e' in Tumblr is a 'big reason' Tumblr is more
successful than Posterous (which, please note, contains an 'e'!).

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coachwei
Does a fast site help improve business success(comparing to a slower site
similar in functionality)? Of course it does. Does performance play a role? It
does. Is it the only reason? No.

The article does not pinpoint the success or failure of a business into a
single reason. The article didn't claim "performance is The reason" that
Tumblr is successful. It says "performance is most likely one of the key
factors".

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awongh
I don't know about this... I use tumblr and it usually seems pretty slow to
me... normally more than the 3sec load time they quote... haven't tried
posterous yet....

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coachwei
Good point. Tumblr is a lot faster than Posterous. However, it is only at
about 50 percentile comparing to other sites over the Internet while Posterous
is below average - in other words, Tumblr's performance is only about average.
Both have lots to be improved.

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jianjin
It is really a good article. We have more and more sites on the internet but
it seems become more and more slow because our web become too "complex".

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bobds
Tumblr would be even faster if their Javascript was a bit lighter. They use
Prototype and various unneeded scripts.

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petervandijck
Yes, but that's only loaded once and then cached, so it's not such a big deal.

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coachwei
no, actually it does matter. Browser caching is not reliable and only covers
around 20% to 25% of requests (according to GoogleMaps JS caching behavior
stats). So it matters quite a bit.

~~~
petervandijck
Really? That's new to me.

~~~
bbuffone
[http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-
research-...](http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-
part-2/)

Towards the end of the article

>> Suprising Results

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page
views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research
that shows this kind of information...

<<

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coachwei
Does web performance matter? For Tumblr and other light blogging service
providers, clearly it does and it made a big difference. A recent New York
Times article pointed out that "Tumblr Leaves Posterous In the Dust". Both are
leading light blogging service providers. However, Tumblr has out-grown
Posterous significantly over the last year. Why? it looks like that one big
reason is that Tumblr has been twice as fast as Posterous.

