The known relation between slow pages and revenue loss is finally in numbers, a joint announcement of search engineers from Google and Microsoft’s Bing has released some stats on a long term research done proving that users will spend less time (and money) while navigating accross slow loading sites (see bellow):
This is another reason to deal with latency and heavy pages for maximising profit within e-commerce sites on top of saving on bandwidth and traffic costs.
I am currently within the last stage of defining my research thesis in computer science, this research will address methods for delivering GeoWeb applications while minimising the effect of network latency on user experience.
This proposal is a result of practical experience in designing and developing web applications for the New Zealand and Australian Internet market for the last 7 years, the research aims to provide scientific evidence and methodologies for minimising the effect of network latency on the load time of web content (see my post on this subject here).
With the latest advances in response/load-time monitoring and measurements services, it is now possible to collect statistics of monitoring agents across the globe and identify network trends towards optimising web delivery according to the originating content requirements.
A typical web based map mash-up could potentially include HTTP requests from several different sources (content providers, storage distributors etc.) spanning across several continents, selecting the optimal resources during the initial load of the page (the DOM Ready browser phase) will be the primary factor for efficiently serving web content.
Within my practical professional experience I have been maintaining and monitoring over 110 servers while optimising the actual web applications running on top of those servers for delivering rich graphic content. This optimisation included usage of CDN providers, requests source tracking and progressive download techniques while monitoring the results from numerous locations around the globe.
A notable network monitoring solution that I have been using within my research since 2006 is Pingdom, which I believe is the only response time monitoring solution that exposes an API. This feature enables querying its worldwide monitoring agents counters for generating real-time, applications specific, global response time reports and statistics.
In February 1882 the Dunedin sailed out of Port Chalmers loaded with New Zealand dairy products targeting London’s markets while overcoming the distance limitations and utilising the latest cooling technologies, becoming the first commercial refrigeration ship ever.
I believe that with the massive move towards SaaS technologies powered by the growing IT Outsourcing/Cloud Computing trend, New Zealand’s prime location and unique IP routing link could play a significant role in researching ways for overcoming network limitations for physically distributed services.
On the arrival of the Dunedin in London 98 days laterThe Times commented: “Today we have to record such a triumph over physical difficulties, as would have been incredible, even unimaginable, a very few days ago…” which sounds very relevant considering the development of the internet today.
I am currently performing some research on introducing ServicePack 2 on top of a running installation of MS Office SharePoint Server, I have decided to collect the relevant Dlls updated by MS within the packaged service pack (coreserverwwsp2.msp), this will allow identifying existing custom site functionality that may be affected by introducing those change.I will concentrate in known issues and possible solution for Content Migration and Web Delivery Caching issues which could effect web faced implementations and could introduceLatencyeffects issues (note: this list will not include InfoPath, Excel Services and BDC related fixes).
Fixes sorted by dlls below:Microsoft.SharePoint.dll (12.0.6421.1000)
1) Migrating data may encounter errors when uniquely secured folders contain draft items.2) You cannot use SOAP calls to restore a site that is two levels deep (/1/2/) if the first level does not exist (/1/).
3) Calling the WebUrlFromPageUrl SOAP method may not work correctly on Web applications that have certain explicit inclusions.
4) SharePoint does not allow some field names to be changed to their original values.
5) No Try-Catch errors may be displayed after a database is marked as read-only.
6) Pages may display errors when served from 64-bit servers.
7) After a site reaches its quota, the site becomes inaccessible.
List views fail when they are grouped by calculated fields or by lookups to calculated fields.
9) Alerts may not be sent correctly on certain installation languages.
10) Breaking permission inheritance may take a long time.
11) Importing a site fails when the site that is being imported contains a subsite that has features that are activated.
12) Indexed columns may not be indexed after a view is deleted.
13) The SharePoint timer service may stop working on 64-bit servers.
14) SharePoint uses more memory than necessary for some operations.
15) 32-bit systems may perform badly in low memory conditions.
16) Import fails on a site that has a workflow that is running on uniquely secured items.
17) Invitation e-mail messages have broken links.
18) Changing the usage log directory may prevent additional logs from being created.
19) List view Web parts that use groups do not page correctly when they are filtered by another Web part.
1) Fix the failure that occurs when you reopen an Audience field in the Content Editor Web part.
2) Fix the failures that occur when you try to add a link by using the local file system naming format (for example, “file://c:/folder”) in myquicklinks.aspx.
3) Fix an issue in which the redirection from Windows SharePoint Services UserInfo to MySite User Profile does not work across farms.
4) Fix creation a document with an illegal file name (such as one containing an ampersand) and attempts to programmatically save it to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 using the Object Model’s FileDialog.Execute() command, the operation may fail without informing the user.
5) Site administrators can create policies on their site content types and can expire items using that content type. If a policy was set on any content type in a site, that policy can no longer be set on content types in the subsites of that site.
6) A comment field is not available for posts on new sites that were created from a saved Blog site template.
7) Users are not warned when their files exceed the maximum path.
Large files may be changed unexpectedly after the files are checked out and then checked in.
9) Sending e-mail for blog posts might not work correctly.
10) When a user selects [today] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.”
11) When a user selects [today] or [me] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.”
Microsoft.Office.Server.dll (12.0.6413.1000)
1) Fixes the occasional issue in which files that are opened for EDIT in Office 2003 or on operating system versions earlier than Windows Vista may be incorrectly opened for READ.
2) Fix an issue in which PSConfig fails while upgrading farms with a pre-created Search database.
3) Instead of reading the required registry keys every 15 minutes while Microsoft Office Outlook is open, the colleague import engine will now read the keys only when Outlook starts. This results in less activity/impact on client systems from Outlook. However, updates to suggested colleagues in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server will now only be calculated when Outlook is started, not every 15 minutes.
Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.dll (12.0.6420.1000)
1) Fix the issue with a gradual upgrade from a non-English version of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and the English language pack to a non-English version of SharePoint Server 2007 and the English language pack.
2) Fix a failure of redirection when the redirect URL contains a space.
3) Add support for upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installed.
4) Fix the PSConfig failure issue that occurs when you apply a patch and trigger an upgrade db access in different versions (2-3).
5) Fix an issue in which the “Scan for Broken Links” functionality is not available after you change the user permissions.
6) Fix an issue in which a full farm restore operation under a new server’s host name still has the fully qualified URLs to the old server’s host name.
7) Survey summaries might not be displayed correctly (line breaks etc.)
Stsadm.exe
1) Fix an issue in which running a command of the form “STSADM -o deletessp -title <SSPName> -force” incorrectly deletes the Shared Service Provider (SSP) databases, even though the -deletedatabases option is not present.
2) Fix an issue in which the stsadm command to display information about an SSP (stsadm -o enumssp) fails if an account that has been granted access to the SSP no longer exists.
3) The mergecontentdbs command for STSAdm.exe will not work if the command is executed by a user who is not a site collection administrator.
List views fail when they are grouped by calculated fields or by lookups to calculated fields.