Category: Performance Testing

Tate website fails under Kraftwerk ticket demand

Kraftwerk

 

Who’d have thought it?
I didn’t realise that Kraftwerk was so popular.

This morning, Twitter and Google Plus are full of people ranting about poor website performance.

Today’s vitriol is reserved for the Tate Modern in London which is selling tickets for the Kraftwerk 2013 shows.

 

 

Here are a few snippets of customer feedback from social media this morning.

Twitter comments - Tate

Disgruntled customers are never a “good news” story. The IT people will have their necks on the blocks, the PR team will be working overtime and I really feel sorry for the people who have to man the phones and take calls from customers who’ve been waiting to get through for hours.

A brief look at the site shows a few things that they could do to relieve their problems, but I suspect that they simply haven’t seen demand like this before. This, of course, makes it hard to plan; but some simple performance testing prior to launch could have identified these problems and prevented such a PR disaster.

What could they have done?

Used a CDN
They appear to host their own images
A CDN could help to take load away from their webservers at peak time

Served scaled images and use lossless image compression
They send large images, but resize them in HTML.
Many images could be compressed without reducing quality.
Large images consume bandwidth and reduce the number of simultaneous users that a site can support.

Use a more scalable application architecture
They seem to be hosted by verio.com who offer various hosting options including cloud as well as conventional hosting plans. Despite an on-demand architecture, if the application isn’t designed and built to scale up to meet demand it can still fail.

LoadRunner update – LR_03159

Screenshot of LoadRunner update notification

 

I really like the new(ish) feature of LoadRunner where updates are now automatic. If your LoadRunner installation is behind a firewall or does not have access to the Internet, now may be a good time to update LoadRunner. This is especially true if your Microsoft patches are handled automatically (perhaps by your IT team).

 

 
Microsoft update 2661254 prevents the use of private keys shorter than 1024 bits for RSA encryption. It appears that this may cause problems for LoadRunner, hence the recent patches for LoadRunner 11 and 11,5.

The Microsoft patch can be downloaded here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2661254 
The HP patch for LoadRunner 11.0 is LR_03160.
The HP patch for LoadRunner 11.5 is LR_03159.

If you haven’t automatically received the patch, it can be downloaded from the normal HP support site.
(SAID required to prove that you have a licence).

Bristol Pound – a great concept but a flawed web launch

I was drawn to the Bristol Pound project by a tweet that I spotted at lunchtime today.

The concept is simple:

  • Launch a local currency to help support the local economy in Bristol.
  • Encourage people to support local businesses.
  • Boost local spending power and lock money into the Bristol economy.

This all sounds great, but I just went to their website at  https://bristolpound.org  and the page took more than 3 minutes to download. Now I’m not blessed with the world’s fastest Internet connection in the office, but that’s a lot longer than most people are prepared to wait.

I was reminded of a couple of StrangeLoop infographics:

The first one describes web user’s boredom thresholds and shows that people abandon slow sites quickly, many never return and even worse, they tell their friends about their bad experience. This can be very damaging for a brand that puts so much effort into their day 1 launch.

User boredom thresholds - infographic

The second infographic documents the increasing size of pages over time. I know that we all use high speed internet connections nowadays, but if a lot of people start to hit your site, you’re going to run out of bandwidth to serve the requests pretty quickly.

I think that the Bristol Pound website is suffering from “page bloat” and here’s why…

Using a Firefox browser with an empty cache and Firebug, I connected to http://bristolpound.org and saw that it took almost 3 minutes for the page to download completely. The page looks great and is graphically rich, but it doesn’t perform well for those first-time visitors hitting the site today.

The image below which is taken from the HAR (HTTP archive) file that I created shows a single image taking 2.33 (139 seconds) minutes to download. The large/slow image is called FINAL_Launch_POSTER_copy.jpg , and it is advertising tonight’s launch party for the Bristol Pound.

The main problem with this image is that somebody has uploaded the full size image to the website and rescaled it using HTML. The original image size is 3,508 x 4,966 pixels which is huge, but it is displayed at only 338 x 495 pixels. Serving a scaled-down image could save 1.8MB of bandwidth for each page request (a 99% size reduction). This would reduce the download time for this component from about 139 seconds to less than 2 seconds. This alone would significantly improve user’s first impressions of the site.

This screenshot shows the “offending image” highlighted in red.

There are other improvements that could be made, but to improve performance for now, I’d simply resize the image in an image editor (MSPAINT would do) and then keep my fingers crossed…..