Blog

May 5th, 2010 by The Clio Team

The Need for (Site) Speed

One of the most important factors in user satisfaction with a web application is speed. Google observed, for example, that search usage dropped when it introduces a delay as small as 100ms in returning search results. Amazon.com reports that every 100ms of latency on its website cost it 1% of profit – and for a multi-billion-dollar company, that amounts to a real number. The cloud computing industry has been pushing aggressively on making web applications faster than ever.

Several key developments in cloud computing technologies have allowed web applications to respond to user interactions faster:

• Web browsers are faster. The newest web browsers are more than 100X faster in executing JavaScript – the web’s programming language – than web browsers from 10 years ago. Just yesterday Google posted an update on its Google Chrome blog announcing that the latest Google Chrome beta benchmarks 30-35% faster than the already-blazingly-fast Google Chrome 4.
• New standards such as HTML5 allow for offline storage and caching of data, improving page responsiveness and allowing for offline access to web applications.
• Ever-increasing broadband and wireless access speeds are expanding the bandwidth of the pipe to “the cloud” every day.

Here at Clio we’ve focused on making Clio faster than ever. We have instrumented Clio so that every page load and every database query is benchmarked, and over the past month we’ve been focusing on re-tooling Clio to improve overall page loads. Last week we rolled out the first of these updates, and the graph below reflects the results of those efforts:

As you can see, the average response time for Clio dropped from about 240ms to about 100ms – almost a 2.5X improvement. As Clio continues to grow we’ll focus on ensuring we deliver the fastest – and most satisfying – user experience possible.