Yesterday I did a workshop at Google Ventures for some of their portfolio companies. I didn’t know how much performance background the audience would have, so I did an overview of everything performance-related starting with my first presentations back in 2007. It was very nostalgic. It has been years since I talked about the best practices from High Performance Web Sites. I reviewed some of those early tips, like Make Fewer HTTP Requests, Add an Expires Header, and Gzip Components.
But I needed to go back even further. Thinking back to before Velocity and WPO existed, I thought I might have to clarify why I focus mostly on frontend performance optimizations. I found my slides that explained the Performance Golden Rule:
80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend.
Start there.
There were some associated slides that showed the backend and frontend times for popular websites, but the data was old and limited, so I decided to update it. Here are the results.
First is an example waterfall showing the backend/frontend split. This waterfall is for LinkedIn. The “backend†time is the time it takes the server to get the first byte back to the client. This typically includes the bulk of backend processing: database lookups, remote web service calls, stitching together HTML, etc. The “frontend†time is everything else. This includes obvious frontend phases like executing JavaScript and rendering the page. It also includes network time for downloading all the resources referenced in the page. I include this in the frontend time because there’s a great deal web developers can do to reduce this time, such as async script loading, concatenating scripts and stylesheets, and sharding domains.
For some real world results I look at the frontend/backend split for Top 10 websites. The average frontend time is 76%, slightly lower than the 80-90% advertised in the Performance Golden Rule. But remember that these sites have highly optimized frontends, and two of them are search pages (not results) that have very few resources.
For a more typical view I looked at 10 sites ranked around 10,000. The frontend time is 92%, higher than the 76% of the Top 10 sites and even higher than the 80-90% suggested by the Performance Golden Rule.
To bring this rule home to the attendees I showed the backend and frontend times for their websites. The frontend time was 84%. This helped me get their agreement that the longest pole in the tent was frontend performance and that was the place to focus.
Afterward I realized that I have timing information in the HTTP Archive. I generally don’t show these time measurements because I think real user metrics are more accurate, but I calculated the split across all 50,000 websites that are being crawled. The frontend time is 87%.
It’s great to have this updated information that shows the Performance Golden Rule is as accurate now as it was back in 2007, and points to the motivation for focusing on frontend optimizations. If you’re worried about availability and scalability, focus on the backend. But if you’re worried about how long users are waiting for your website to load focusing on the frontend is your best bet.
Source:http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/
