The business case for web performance is obvious. Faster apps increase revenue. Using resources more efficiently reduces operational costs. The push to the cloud and the down economy are just amplifying the importance of web performance for today’s web. So it is not a surprise that the performance testing market is huge.
But there is a gap in the performance testing market when it comes to performance testing of modern web applications. Talk to anyone about web performance and they start talking about the usual suspects:
- Refactoring, optimizing, JITing, caching application code and data
- Database tuning, queries, store procedures, indexes, denormalizing tables
- Reverse proxies, memcached, Varnish, load balancers, SSL accelerators, etc.
But recent research has found generating dynamic content accounts for typically less than 10% of page load times. The vast majority of page load time is spent downloading, parsing, and rendering all the components that make up a modern application. It is on the front end, and not on the back end, where optimizations can be made that drop seconds off load times. JavaScript code, CSS, the inner workings of browsers, HTTP voodoo. I am a thought leader in exactly this space.
The majority of widely known web performance optimization practices today focus on the application tier or the database tier. Traditional performance testings tools do no front end optimization testing. And yet the front end has the biggest impact on web application performance in modern applications. Do you see the disconnect yet?
This is why Zoompf exists. There is an enormous opportunity to make real improvements to the web as we know it. Zoompf will be leading that charge.
