When Amazon Sprites go bad (on Facebook URL Preview)

I was posting a comment onto Facebook today and I had to laugh when the URL image preview displayed this – a sprite – instead of another image or Logo.

The sprite in question is the “page furniture” with navigation elements, icons etc

It is served from a custom, cookie-free domain, with a far futures expiry date (Cache-Control:max-age=605381123)

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/gno/images/orangeBlue/navPackedSprites-UK-15._V202471918_.png

Nice to see that Amazon are following the #webperf best practices, even if it confuses the heck out of Facebook on occasion!

Comments

Alexa has performance rankings too!

I must confess that this one had slipped past me… I wasn’t aware that Alexa was now offering performance rankings as well! Alexa now shows an “average load time” as well as a “comparitive ranking” (i.e. 51% of sites are slower). Interesting data for your next website analysis! It’s worth noting that the quoted “1.404 seconds” is about the same as the “repeat view” measurement webpagetest.org (testing from the UK node shows that www.johnlewis.com takes about 7.2 seconds to load with an empty cache, and 1.6 seconds with a primed cache, median values over 5 runs). Presumably this is an average across all Alexa toolbar users, on all johnlewis.com pages (large and small) with empty and primed caches.

Load Testing Case Study

Since we are talking about presentations here is another one I did for the Load Testing Expo in 2009. It’s a case study of how we did the performance testing for an internet-facing content/community/jobs site. Test Expo 2009 Site Confidence & Seriti Consulting Load Test Case Study View more presentations from Stephen Thair .

Real-time Web Analytics just took a step forward with Pion v4

Awesome news from Atomic Lab’s that Pion 4.0 has been released! The new Dashboard functionality looks amazing – real-time web analytics likes page views, visitor sessions etc as well as performance analytics like load time and server reply time – along with the usual Pion goodness like tag-free analytics and customer journey visualisation with the Replay feature. Can’t wait to implement this on some customer sites!

The Operations Manager

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