Web performance in seven steps: Summary and Conclusions

Previous time I blogged about the last step of the seven steps, step 7: Share the responsibility for the whole chain, a non-technical but rather a communication and behavior thing which I found crucial for success. We now have reached the end of this series and I'll sum up the topics we've dealt with and draw some conclusions. In this growing on line world with demanding customers it has become essential that services provided on the web are always available and always fast enough. This is often challenging to developers and operators: performance problems manifest themselves in various ways, like in frustration, loss of revenue and disruption of development; and just adding hardware is a doubtful solution. The question is: how can we as developers and operators assure that our web site is always available and always fast? My answer is: you need the right approach. I present that approach: measure, don’t guess; seven steps to performance success. These seven steps are as follows:

• Step 1: Define performance requirements;
• Step 2: Execute a proof of concept;
• Step 3: Test representatively;
• Step 4: Test continuously;
• Step 5: Monitor and diagnose;
• Step 6: Tune based on evidence;
• Step 7: Share the responsibility for the whole chain.

This approach provides a pro-active way of working which my customers appreciate as valuable. It can actually be leveraged to assure high performance all the time, for virtually any on- and off-line application. This blog series has been an interesting journey for me. Some time ago we presented our EJAPP Top 10 of performance problems. Now we have added this approach of seven steps to help assure your applications performance. It has worked for us and our customers. How does this all work for you in practice? We’d like to hear your feedback.