Scalability vs. Performance

Creating scalable web sites that can handle many simultaneous requests and still provide fast experience for each user is hard. Historically, the industry was not differentiating Scalability and Performance, but with emergence of front-end engineering, new field of Web Performance Optimization was born and it became critical to approach them separately.

Sergey Chernyshev (@sergeyche) compares these two directions of web engineering and describes the differences between them. He also covers current performance trends and describes different approaches to take in order to measure and analyze Web Performance in comparison to traditional methods that are successfully used to test scalability of web systems.

Talk given at New York Web Performance Meetup on March 27, 2013
http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-NY/events/101100592/

Transcript

1. Size & Speed Scalability vs. Performance NY Web Performance Meetup March 27, 2013
2. About • Doing web dev and operations since 1996 • Tech Director, Web Ops and Dev @ truTV/Turner • Creator of ShowSlow • Organizer at NY WebPerf • Board member of WPO Foundation
3. Why Do We Scale?
4. Available Resources CPU Memory Disk Network
5. CPU & Memory • Classical scale problem • Scale up (Moor's law) • Scale out (cloud)
6. Storage • More available • Speed and reliability • Slower then in the past / SSD
7. Network ??? • Easy to scale for static assets • Trouble if you hit dynamic
8. User Experience
9. How Page Loads ~8 sec above the fold ~0.5 sec for first request only 6.25% on back end 12sec, 157 req, ~1Mb http://bit.ly/pageload-video http://bit.ly/pageload-filmstrip
10. Our Tools
11. Load Testing apply load, measure backend performance degradation
12. "Synthetic" testing time ALL components of page load HAR
13. Real User Measurement measure key performance metrics for REAL users Boomerang.js
14. Speed, is it important? RUM data. Aaron Kulick, Cliff Crocker @ Wallmart Labs
15. Speed, it is important! RUM data. Aaron Kulick, Cliff Crocker @ Wallmart Labs
16. Speed it up for one user!
17. New York Web Performance Meetup Sergey Chernyshev @sergeyche @perfplanet