The busiest online shopping season is about to start and it’s time to make a quick check on whether the top shopping sites are prepared for the big consumer rush or whether they are likely going to fail because their pages are not adhering to Web performance best practices. The holiday rush seems to start [...]

We blogged a lot about performance problems in Internet Explorer caused by the missing native implementation of getElementsByClassName (101 on jQuery Selector Performance, 101 on Prototype CSS Selectors, Top 10 Client Side Performance Problems, …). Firefox on the other side has always implemented this and other native lookup methods. This results in much faster page [...]

One of our clients occasionally runs into the following problem with their web app: They host their B2B web application in their East Coast Data Center with their clients accessing the app from all around the United States. Occasionally they have clients complaining about bad page load times or that certain features just don’t work [...]

After spending a lot of time focusing on Client-Side Web 2.0 Performance Problems it is time to focus on specific Server-Side Performance Problems. Last week I worked with a client that runs a custom application on Microsoft CRM 4.0 and experienced performance problems in their test environment. Individual web requests to query or update data [...]

A client of ours recently contacted me with the question: We use Keynote, WebPagetest and dynaTrace AJAX – but we get different results with these tools/services. WebPagetest tells us that our page is very slow – but dynaTrace on my local machine does not. What can be the problem here? What’s the difference? I took [...]

Last week I got the following two questions from one of our clients “We use ASP.NET PostBacks but can’t find the PurePath for the request triggering the PostBack handler – any hints?” “We see many ThreadAbortExceptions in our ASP.NET Application and we are not sure why they happen – are they expected?” Time for a [...]

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is shipping the next version of the popular ASP.NET MVC Framework with its IDE. A year ago I blogged about my findings when getting my hands on the first version of ASP.NET MVC. The MVC Framework provides really nice features that make it very easy to build web applications on [...]

Performance implications of certain CSS Selectors are not specific to a certain JavaScript Library like Prototype. I recently blogged about the internals of CSS Selectors in jQuery. The same holds true for every JavaScript library that offers CSS Selectors. Certain lookups can be done by using the native browser functions like getElementById or getElementsByTagName. Lookups by [...]

Every time I work with one of our .NET customers to help them with managing their application performance I come across the same problems as seen with other clients before: lots of ADO.NET queries, many hidden exceptions in core or 3rd party .NET libraries, slow 3rd party components, inefficient custom code, … Too often we [...]

I recently gave a talks on the behaviour of different JPA frameworks at W-JAX(Germany) and TheServerSide Java Symposium (Prague). As some people have asked me, I am publishing the samples as well. I would also give away the eclipse project, however with all the third party libraries I am sure I will end up not [...]