Friday, August 20, 2010

Speed Matters: Urs Holzle from Google on acceleration

This talk (video, audio) - was really interesting for me. When you get to situations where bursts are coming at you tens of thousands of hits per second (perhaps driven by some social meme), the natural response is just to scale out. However, there are other things that make a lot difference - some you can control and some you can't. For example DNS and content acceleration around geographies is something we work at.

In this talk Urs covers things that can be done now and also things Google are trying to improve explicitly (in Chrome, Android, their own DNS servers, upgrading of Google Analytics tags, Jquery CDN etc) under the hood via IETF drafts and recommendations for web developers.

He also reiterates the thing that marketing knows but geeks forget - "speed = revenue". People will be more engaged and spend more if you are looking after them. 27 minutes well spent.

I think we are going to see a bunch of new mobile design patterns emerge as well supporting interactive performance that can be learned from gaming or even the Powerbuilder, Gupta generation of the early '90s. Mobile (not Mobile Web) is heading back to highly engaged client-server.

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