
Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it - paulsb
http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-crush-it
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iheartmemcache
Some of these tips are really good (using a CDN, caching on basically every
layer, using YSlow), but does the author really believe using FPGAs and ASICs
for websites is really practical? I've yet to see one real-world report of
people using FPGAs to speed up sites. Hell, I haven't even seen any academic
proof of concepts focusing on the merits of FPGAs in the web environment.

That's not to say that FPGA's won't be useful (they could potentially be
helpful for real-time ranking and the like), it just seems out of character to
mention something like that on a website scalability site. Grain of salt, and
all that.

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smithjchris
FPGAs are impractical. They are designed for integration and custom design
rather than performance. Any data processing tasks are probably not worth it.
Intel i7 series CPUs are probably a better investment as they have native
text-processing instructions!

~~~
Andys
I just found a benchmark on Intel's site that shows the effect of enabling the
text processing instructions in SSE4.2. They claim a 25% speedup for XML
parsing and 37% for XML validating.

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daleharvey
I think this quote should have been a headline as opposed to an easily
missable list item

'80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend, so it makes
sense to concentrate efforts there before heroically rewriting the backend.'

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jules
What is done in that 80-90%, and how do you optimize it?

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patio11
Watch the YSlow guys and be enlightened. Everything they produce about the
subject (and I don't just mean the plugin) is solid gold. They are easily the
best "Follow these simple directions and you will make money" technical
material I've ever seen.

video of talk: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHvs3V8DBA>

slides of another: [http://www.slideshare.net/stoyan/high-performance-web-
pages-...](http://www.slideshare.net/stoyan/high-performance-web-pages-20-new-
best-practices)

~~~
daleharvey
sorry way away, yeh the yslow stuff is really good, the new google tool is
also handy although not particularly different.

<http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/> \- also has a series of good website
performance videos

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mistermann
A bit off topic, but could someone recommend any good articles or case studies
highlighting the importance of site design and the potential affect on sales
of nuanced site changes (ie: I recall reading an article about how a small
change to a checkout process increased sales x%, but can't find that article).

I am trying to put together some reading material for a non-technical person
in my startup who is unconcerned that our web design company is botching
things.

(Even if you don't have a specific link, if you remember reading something and
can remember the company name or an googleable information, it would be much
appreciated).

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patio11
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erdEZvOq6wo> (Several examples where a single
call to action was changed trivially, resulting in millions.)

[http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/developing-
shopping...](http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/developing-shopping-
cart.htm) (Rather less impressive ;) )

[http://blog.pokercopilot.com/2008/10/do-big-shiny-
download-b...](http://blog.pokercopilot.com/2008/10/do-big-shiny-download-
buttons-work.html) (Answer: yes.)

~~~
mattyb
OT: Your article was damn good. Have you written any others (going up to
/articles didn't work)?

~~~
patio11
Most of my articles are on my blog rather than my business site -- I only put
them there when I need to use Rails to spit something out for the article.

The blog is at <http://www.kalzumeus.com> .

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Locke1689
"Latency is physics, bandwidth is money."

