HOW TO TEST PERFORMANCE

AND NOT DIE TRYING

Diego Cardozo

Sr. Web Performance Engineer

@NetSuite @diecard

Agenda

  • Why it matters

  • What to test

  • How to test

Why it matters

Why is performance important for our business?

  • Google: 2% slower = 2% less searches/user
  • Yahoo: 400 ms faster = 9% more traffic
  • Amazon: 100ms faster = 1% more revenue
  • Shopzilla: 5s faster
    • 25% more site visits
    • 7 to 12% more revenue
  • Google takes load times into account when
    ranking a site

Why it matters

Why is performance important for ourselves?

"The best part about performance testing is how much you learn about technology in general"

What to test

 

What should we measure?

  • Response times and speed

  • How much load we can handle

  • How the system behaves

What to test

 

Have a goal in mind - 3 alternatives

  • Performance budget
  • Business-specific goal
    • Twitter's "time to first tweet"
  • Google's RAIL model

How to test

First rule

1. Measure

2. Optimize

How to test

Second rule

How to test

Alternatives

Emulate a browser, run a test case and record response times for each request

Passively send performance information directly from the user's application

Synthetic monitoring

Real user monitoring (RUM)

How to test

Synthetic monitoring

How to test

Real user monitoring

Resources

dcardozo@netsuite.com
@diecard