We are very proud to win the New Zealand Internet Industry award for Internet Innovator.

Ed Robinson, CEO, accepted the Award on behalf of Aptimize "We are delighted and honoured to be recognized by the Internet community for our contribution to the positive impact the internet has to our economy and society.  Our vision is to make the web faster for everyone and we are rapidly executing on that vision as we continue to speed-up some of the biggest websites in the world”.

The Internet Industry Awards recognize excellence  for using the Internet as an enabling platform for business, education and society.  We had dinner and a great conversation with both the Honourable Steven Joyce, Minister of Communications and Technology and Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of the board of ICAAN.   Thanks to the judges, Internet NZ and the Liz Dengate Thrush Foundation for  a great night.

A faster SharePoint website increases revenue, decreases costs, improves user experience and productivity, drives more traffic to your site.

Having the fastest quad core server, gigabytes of memory and solid state disks, does not guarantee fast access to websites from the user’s perspective - So why are SharePoint and other websites so slow?

In this webinar we will walk through:

• What makes web pages slow to load
• Free performance measurement tools
• How to improve your performance results instantly

We will also show you how the Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator improves performance for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 based websites and intranets. 

Date:        Thursday, July 29, 2010     
Time:        1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

Congratulations to Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders, Jessie Robbins, May, Yvonne and the rest of the team at O’Reilly. 

This year’s Velocity web performance and operations conference was the most successful yet – and it’s great to see the continued enthusiasm, innovation and growth within the industry.

For those of you who didn’t make the conference, or like us were too busy in the exhibition hall, you can see the session videos here.

My favorite – John Rauser from Amazon on Creating Cultural Change

This week we'll be exhibiting at the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, June 22-24 in sunny Santa Clara, CA.

We always look forward to going to Velocity because we get to be surrounded by people passionate about web performance and faster websites; we get to catch up with customers, meet new ones, exchange ideas, and generally get to be absorbed in what we love - fast websites.

We'll be at Booth 300, here's who you can expect to see:

Ed Robinson, CEO. Ed can answer almost any question on web performance, and has the vision that no one should have to wait for any website to load. Our company is dedicated to delighting customers with faster websites and intranets, this is all we do.

Ed fronts our videos, the latest explains the effect of distance on page load times.

Aaron Bellingham, Business Manager. Aaron is the first point of contact for getting a faster website. Aaron coordinates business and technical information you need, and sets up trials and production. Often we can speed up your website on the same day you contact us. The only thing faster than our website accelerator products is Aptimize’s service.

Aaron also works closely with our Partners so if you're interested in becoming one track Aaron down for a chat at Booth 300.

Aaron 'Beaker' Sinclair, Software Development Engineer (Linux). Beaker is Aptimize’s lead developer for Aptimize’s Website Accelerator for Linux, and architected some of Aptimize’s advanced techniques for CSS optimization. Beaker loves talking about the underlying technologies we use, so track him down at Booth 300.

Just as the performance of e-commerce web sites is critical to private sector businesses, web site performance is crucial to the proper functioning of school educational web sites.

With this in mind, Research Machines (RM), one of the largest education ICT providers, has deployed Aptimize's Website Accelerator (WAX) to provide faster content to users regardless of their network speed or desktop hardware.

Teachers use RM's platform to deliver online content to pupils during lessons, and pupils use the platform to submit homework or collaborate with other pupils. In addition, parents access the portal to look at the attainment levels, attendance and behaviour of their children at school. The platform is based on Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 collaboration and content management platform. Brian Gibson, technical architect for the RM platform, said: "RM's Learning Platform serves a demanding audience, and optimising response times is important for avoiding frustration or even disturbance in the classroom. "RM has an account for every parent, teacher and school in Scotland. It also has platforms serving the rest of the UK, which hosts 2.2 million user accounts. Gibson explained that the company also has platforms in Australia and is building one in the US.

Why roll out Aptimize?

The scenario confronting RM was different from that of normal service providers. "With a school there will be two or three classrooms with, say, 30 PCs connecting to the portal all at the same time, each of them looking at the same web site and pulling down some very rich media content," said Gibson. Where it is running off a single portal, that can lead to the system reaching a saturation point. "We're trying to improve the experience for schools. We can't use the excuse that the learning platform doesn't perform well enough because a school's internet connection is slow, "explained Gibson. Aptimize was used by RM to dramatically reduce the number of connections a browser has to make to get its content. "For example, if one web page has to make, say, 50 connections [to its source] to deliver the content, this is reduced to 23 with Aptimize, so there's less time spent on that 'ropey' internet connection," said Gibson. "Aptimize reduced even our slowest pages from load times of seven seconds to just over two."

Deploying Aptimize

Gibson said that Aptimize caught his eye with the work it had done with Microsoft's SharePoint.Microsoft.com site. The company said that Aptimize's WAX system was relatively straightforward and that the system was implemented by just two people from the company using out-of-the-box instructions. It did not require developer skills.

Management and monitoring

RM releases fairly large updates to its platform once a quarter, meaning that every time the company releases an update it has to ensure that Aptimize deploys properly and does not break the portal. The company uses a system called Keynote to monitor the performance of its platforms by checking web pages from different DSL locations. "This gives a nice graph showing how fast the pages are running. We wanted to improve on our slowest pages [which took about seven seconds]. Aptimize knocked that down to 2.5 seconds and we were able to monitor this," said Gibson. RM's future plans include using Aptimize to expand into new territories such as Australia and the US, as well on other parts of RM's online infrastructure including its management information systems.

>> Source ApplicationPerformance.com

We frequently get asked to explain why websites are slow, how distance and visitor location effects page load speed, and how Aptimize works its magic to speed up websites.

Ed put together a short video to help answer these questions.

>> Any more questions we can help you with?

Wireshark is the must have tool used by network IT professionals to troubleshoot, secure and optimize networks. Rated #2 in the Top 100 Network Security Tools by sectools.org Wireshark is the world's most popular network analyzer. So when Laura Chappell authored the ultimate resource book on Wireshark - Wireshark Network Analysis: The Official Wireshark Certified Network Analyst Study Guide - and included a case study on Aptimize we felt pretty honoured.

In Chapter 8: Interpret Basic Trace File Statistics Laura provides step-by-step procedures for application analysis methods to determine if  an application affected network browsing performance using an analysis of Aptimize Website Accelerator running on Microsoft's Sharepoint and graphing methods to illustrate the effect of this tuning product. Laura then used Wireshark to show exactly how Aptimize Website Accelerator altered the traffic flow and increased performance.

"What a dream! As I delved into the packets I could see exactly
how Aptimize Website Accelerator dramatically improved website
loading times and significantly reduced overhead on the network."
Laura Chappell

In the other chapters of the book readers learn to capture wired and wireless traffic, focus on the cause of slow web browsing, identify why applications don't run properly across the network, locate the cause of poor VoIP call quality, determine why WLANs are plagued with problems and more.

The author, Laura Chappell is the founder of Wireshark University and Chappell University and has been analyzing networks for over 20 years. The foreword was written by Gerald Combs, creator of Wireshark.

>> Find out more about the book
>> Table of contents
>> Buy the book

The latest version of our Website Accelerator - WAX (2.2) is now available. If you already have an account you can get the latest version from your 'Downloads' page. If you want to try WAX for the first time just create an account for access to the download.

How to upgrade instructions are available and please contact us if you have any questions.

Here's whats new:

• Simplified UI for a faster configuration experience
• Enhanced CDN integration – fast and simple leverage of CDNs and domain sharding
• Named resource sets (developer extensibility increasing reuse of common resources across pages)
• Improved tracing and diagnostic tools
• Added support for configuration and management of load balanced clusters
• Reporting of internal operational statistics via config too.
• Added ability to resize an image explicitly using a custom rule

Getting a faster website just got easier.

Got a question? Contact us.

This month we published two 2010 Website Performance Benchmark whitepapers. This research is based on measuring the load times of all the Fortune 500 (USA) and FTSE 350 (UK) companies and compiling a set of performance benchmarks that all websites should use.

We measured the homepage of each website using four performance benchmarks:

1. First view load time (domestic)
2. First view load time (international)
3. Repeat view load time
4. Start render time

The load times are real world “end user load times” i.e. how long it takes to load a page from the time a user enters an URL in their browser to when the page displays in the browser.

Methodology

To obtain these results, we used WebPageTest.org – a free online tool that accurately measures load times by using Internet Explorer 7 on a dedicated machine from locations around the world to load the webpage and measure load times to “document complete” – where all the page elements are loaded, but before any flash animations begin.

We performed tests measuring load times from Dulles VA USA; Wellington, New Zealand and Gloucester UK, the global load times are an average of the test results from the three locations.

Results

Fortune 500 - 2010 Website Performance Benchmarks

Fortune 500 - Results data

Fortune 500 - Infographic

FTSE 350 - 2010 Website Performance Benchmarks

FTSE 350 - Results data

FTSE 350 - Infographic

How they compare

• Overall global load times are almost identical:  UK:9.592, USA 9.462
• The UK domestic load times are faster: UK 5.545, USA 7.066
• UK start render times are 29% slower UK 3.817, USA 2.960
• UK domestic repeat view load times are 25% slower:  UK: 4.947 USA: 3.970
• Overall, the USA websites are richer – 19% more content and 17% more HTTP requests

Ed interviewed by Keith Shaw on NetworkWorld.com on why web site load times suck.

It's a 16 minute podcast talking about how the growth of mobile devices, bloated graphics, videos and applications, and slow carrier networks are all contributing to increased web site load times and why, if your site isn't loading in 7 seconds or less, you're potentially losing readers, customers and revenue. Grab a coffee.