There’s a common understanding across the performance industry that the cache sizes on mobile devices are small. While everybody seems to agree on that fact, we couldn’t find the actual cache size indicated anywhere. So we measured it – and the conclusion is that they’re indeed much too small.
The growth of Web browsing from smart phones and tablets is skyrocketing, putting pressure on site owners to improve the user experience on these devices. One of the top issues for mobile users is performance. With slower CPUs and slower connections, browsing speed can be painful. Creating a faster site on a growing variety of mobile devices is a major challenge for site owners. To address this need, Blaze is introducing a mobile optimization service that will automatically transform sites to make them load faster on smart phones and tablets.
The Web front end is the single largest performance bottleneck for most sites. Blaze is a Web Performance Optimization service that automatically optimizes frontend page elements to accelerate load times. A typical site will experience a doubling of performance after apply the Blaze optimizations.
From the day we launched Mobitest, we were also working on getting it working on Tablets. Today, after a few rounds of bug fixes and UI improvements, our tablet agents are finally ready for prime time. To try it out, simply choose a tablet from the agent drop-down menu over at Mobitest.
Most of the conversation in the WPO community revolves around HTML, scripts and stylesheets. These are clearly the more complex items on pages, and so there are many variations on what can be done with them. However, images account for over 50% of the total page size, the largest single component.
Today I’m happy to announce the first two Mobitest locations outside our main lab in Ottawa, Canada: an iPhone 4 in Amsterdam, hosted by Aaron Peters, and a Nexus S in Dulles, hosted by Patrick Meenan. Thanks to Aaron and Patrick for helping expanding Mobitest to more parts of the globe! You can try out these new locations simply by browsing to http://mobitest.akamai.com/ and selecting the relevant location.
We hope these two locations are but the first of many. Mobile Web Performance is very location sensitive, and more locations means better visibility into performance, and eventually faster websites. If you’re interested in hosting a test location, please let us know at contact@blaze.io. The locations are currently all WiFi based, but we hope to add 3G networks to the list as well.
Just over a month ago, Steve Souders launched a great service called the HTTP Archive. The service collects HTTP and performance data from thousands of websites, offering great insights into the state of the web and how it changes over time.
It’s been almost 3 months since we launched Mobitest, and we’ve learned a lot in that time. The service is getting used more and more, and it’s always nice to see the phones get hyper-active when we get a mention in some presentation 😉