Alois Reitbauer explained in detail how dynaTrace continuously monitors several thousand URLs and uploads the performance data to the public ShowSlow.com instance. More and more of our dynaTrace AJAX Community Members are taking advantage of this integration in their internal testing environments. They either use Selenium, Watir or other functional testing tools to continuously test their web applications. They use the free dynaTrace AJAX edition to capture performance metrics such as Time to First Impression, Time to Fully Loaded, Number of Network Requests or Size of the Site. ShowSlow is then used to receive those performance beacons, stores it in a repository and provides a nice Web UI to analyze the captured data over time. The following illustration shows a graph from the public ShowSlow instance that contains performance results for a tested website of a period of several months:

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Every time I meet up with web developers, either through a customer engagement or when I am giving a presentation about web performance optimization, I ask this question: Who is using Firefox and who is using Internet Explorer as the main browser? The answer is easy to guess. I hardly ever get any hands raised for Internet Explorer. And honestly – I don’t blame them as there are so many great tools on Firefox such as Firebug or YSlow that are great to profile and debug your web application. The problem though is that a big majority of their end-users are going to use Internet Explorer (46% market share in Nov 2010) and might not be happy with their end-user-experience. Check out the following blog posts for more details on bad performing web sites in Internet Explorer: Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems in Web 2.0.

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HTML5 introduces Application Cache, a new feature that enables you to make web apps and sites available offline. The new specification also provides an easy way to prefetch some or all of your web app’s assets (HTML files, images, CSS, JavaScript, and so on) while the client is still online. During this caching process, files are stored in an application cache, where they sit ready for future offline use. Compare this to regular browser caching, in which pages that you visit are cached in the browser’s cache based on server-side rules and client-side configuration. But—even if web pages are cached normally, this does not provide a reliable way for you to access pages while you’re in offline mode (in an airplane, for example). In addition, an application cache can cache pages that have not been visited at all and are therefore typically unavailable in the regular browser cache. Prefetching files can even speed up your site’s performance, though you are of course using bandwidth to download those files initially.

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In this edition of our WPO Use Case series I discuss another very important use case. Load Time Optimization is most likely the most vital use case from an end user perspective. At the same time it is also highly important from a business perspective as studies by ShopZilla or Google and Bing show that load times have immediate effects on user behavior. The higher the load, the less end users are interested in interacting with the page. Load time therefore has a direct relationship to user acceptance and also business goals.

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This article is first in a series of four that will help readers grasp the changes that are being introduced to the web and web browsers with HTML5. This article will provide an overview of the current browser support for html5 and the kind of things that it can do as well as its limitations.

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We are celebrating the first birthday of dynaTrace AJAX Edition with a new version of this deep-dive browser diagnostics tool for Internet Explorer. We just recently reached 20k+ active users and are glad that people like Steve Souders or John Resig endorsed this tool in the last year. Download it here! The early adopters already know the first version of this feature from our dynaTrace AJAX Edition 2.0 Beta 1. Based on the Web Performance Optimization Best Practices from dynaTrace, Yahoo and Google we now grade different aspects of the analyzed web site. We look at the usage of Network Caching, Number of Resources on the page, Server-Side and JavaScript Performance as well as overall page load timings. dynaTrace AJAX Edition celebrates its first birthday with a new version Thanks for all the great feedback on our dynaTrace Forums, on our blog posts or through twitter. Our community has driven this release and the enhancements we made. The Good News is: there is more to come :-)

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OTRS (www.otrs.com), the world's leading provider of open source Help Desk and ITIL-compatible IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today launched OTRS Help Desk 3.0, featuring a brand new Ajax-powered interface designed to dispatch help tickets 30 percent faster, under the most demanding usage scenarios. "OTRS exceeded my expectations and helped to redeem my faith in open source software," stated Paul Hill, System Administrator of the Sitka, Alaska school district. "As a system administrator, you come across open source solutions that are far from refined and so problematic that the amount of work they save aren't worth the time and effort to get them up and running. OTRS was a pleasant change."

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Azul Systems this week began what may turn out to be an orderly retreat from its high-priced high-maintenance hardware – appliances based on ever so chi-chi many-core proprietary chips and 10 rounds of VC funding that tops $200 million. By fielding software that runs on 64-bit garden-variety x86 commodity servers and does essentially the same thing as its six-year-old Vega boxes, which is to tickle the performance of ye ole stodgy, garbage collection-constricted Java applications, the company could wind up in the arms of some sugar daddy with a fat pocketbook. The software is the Zing stuff Azul said it was developing over the summer and now it’s here, an elastic runtime platform for all kinds of configurations of Java apps, especially those high-volume ones like web portals, trading platforms and e-commerce web sites, where response times just might be important.

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