Mouse in the House

Posted by mark on April 26th, 2011

Social networking sites are a global phenomenon. Millions now go online on a daily basis to engage in one or more social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

What’s the problem with that? With millions of site visitors and complicated web pages with exhausting amounts of content coming from multiple sources, these sites can slow to an Internet snail’s pace.

Why speed matters?

• Web visitors have really short attention spans and high expectations. They will abandon a website in nano-seconds if it lags.
• Google is now using load times as a factor in search placement. Believe it or not, this still matters even to the social network giants.
• “Bad will” or brand damage happens at the speed of light. Sites start to get sluggish, people talk, start tweeting and it’s all over the Internet.

So how are these sites stacking up? We recently monitored the page load time performance of a public profile page of 22 of the world’s top social sites using our real browser monitoring product. We tested these sites from April 6 through April, 20, 2011 using the combination of measuring a profile page using real browsers, which we believe gives us the best representation of actual performance from a real user’s perspective.

Fifty percent of the sites had slow load times. Facebook at 1091 milliseconds, blew away the competition by a long shot and had the fastest page load time during the reporting period, which is fairly impressive considering it also has the most traffic. Coming in last was the ailing MySpace at 7859 milliseconds followed closely by Friendster at 6473 milliseconds and Posterous at 5973 milliseconds.

We use two performance limits to decide if a website’s load time is good, ok or bad: two and four seconds, based on the research conducted by Akamai in 2009. Anything two seconds or under is considered good. Anything over four seconds is considered bad.

Facebook has set a standard and shows that speed can be achieved regardless of traffic and page complexity. Speed still isn’t a top priority for a lot of these very popular sites, and with 50% of the sites being too slow, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

• You can test any website using our free tool: http://loads.in/
• This survey is based on WatchMouse Real Browser Monitoring.
• The current status of all of the social network sites monitored can be seen here: http://social.downornot.com/

Posted by mark on April 1st, 2011

URL shorteners. Lots of people use them every day – including the team at WatchMouse. URL shorteners like bit.ly, Google’s goo.gl, Twitter’s t.co, and Facebook’s fb.me are widely used nowadays, but how reliable and how fast are they really?

We took a look at the pros and cons of URL shorteners in March 2010, and thought it only fair to see how URL shorteners are performing one year later.

And, what a difference a year makes! Last year, Facebook’s fb.me was at the bottom of the list in terms of speed, but this year fb.me tops our list joining Google’s goo.gl and BudURL with 100% uptime and a much improved loading speed.

Why (not) using URL Shorteners

There are some obvious pros and cons of URL shorteners.

On the plus side:

• URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (e.g. so it fits easily in a Twitter message)
• They enable you to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL
• Some URL shorteners like t.co and mcaf.ee also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts

But on the down side, URL shorteners also introduce:

• An additional single point of failure: when a URL shortener service is down (or corrupt) the link won’t work
• Additional load time for a page to fully load

URL Shorteners Uptime

WatchMouse monitored the most popular URL shorteners from February 24 – March 28, 2011 to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 25 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. Uptime is an issue for URL shorteners because it has a direct impact on the uptime availability of the website that the URL shortener actually directs to. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:

Uptime is still clearly an issue for some of the URL shorteners, but what a difference a year makes! Last year Facebook’s fb.me landed at the lower regions of our list. Things have changed dramatically this year and now only fb.me, goo.gl, and BudURL scored a perfect 100%. And to be fair, Twitter’s t.co would also score a perfect 100% if they weren’t blocked from China, which is obviously out of their control.

According to our data, twurl.cc, tr.im and to. appear to be dead in the water and inactive with over 31 days of downtime. Digg.com racked up over 19 days of downtime, while snurl.com had over 14 hours of downtime, making them our worst performers and by far the slowest among the active URL shorteners.

URL Shorteners Speed

The performance results can be seen in the chart below:

Note that we left out the resolve time in this chart, please see the full report for a version with the resolve time included and what it means.

• lnkd.in is the slowest and adds over 700 milliseconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link (excluding the resolve time), which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience.
• goo.gl is super speedy and does a redirection in just about 100 milliseconds, which is really impressive we think.

Live URL Shortener Status Report

We continuously monitor URL shorteners and share the results publicly through our website portal. The real-time status of each of the sites and a seven-day history can be found at http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. You can also receive Twitter alerts so you know immediately when URL shorteners go down by following http://twitter.com/url_shorteners.

URL Shortener Popularity

It’s not obvious to measure the popularity of URL shorteners, but traffic metric for the domain does give an indication:

This information comes from Alexa and was requested for the five most “famous” URL Shorteners.

Seeing that bit.ly is seeing way more traffic than the others we can conclude they are doing a very good job in terms of availability and speed.

[disclaimer: bit.ly and Twitter are WatchMouse customers]

Methodology and full report

The URL shorteners were checked every five minutes from one of the 58 WatchMouse global website monitoring stations. For each short URL, only the redirection was measured, not the actual loading of the target page. The redirection was expected to complete within four seconds without any errors (like when a server error occurred or if the expected target URL location was not found in the http header). If that time was exceeded, WatchMouse verified the results using another of its monitoring stations and the result was counted as unavailable.

The full report can be found here: Performance and Uptime of URL Shorteners.

What do you think? Have URL shorteners improved dramatically over the past year or is there still room for improvement? We welcome your feedback and comments!

Posted by mark on July 1st, 2010

Soccer (also knows as football in the rest of the world) team sites, sports and social media sites are experiencing increased traffic – with big spikes during the match and after scores – due to the 2010 FIFA World Cup competition. We thought it would be interesting to measure the uptimes of the websites associated with the qualifying FIFA World Cup teams, the six Federation websites and FIFA.com.

Today we released a new report with the findings of how the websites associated with the 2010 World Cup performed. We were able to test and measure availability from all over the world, and specifically from South Africa with our newly placed monitoring station in Cape Town.

Coincidence (or maybe not?) that a number of the sites with the poorest uptimes were those of teams that failed to qualify among the final eight teams in the semi-finals. Only 10 sites had 100% uptimes and that includes the team site of The Netherlands!
Hup, Holland, Hup! That’s Go, Holland, Go! for our English speaking friends. Hmmmm….wonder who we’re rooting for???

Click here to read the full report or visit the public status page and view the live status and statistical data.

Posted by mark on March 16th, 2010

URL shorteners. We use them. You use them. Lots of people use them. URL shorteners like bit.ly are widely used nowadays, but are they really as good as they appear to be?

Mouse in the House digs a bit deeper into the pros and cons of URL shorteners.

On the positive side:

• URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (i.e. so it fits easily in a Twitter message)
• They enable you to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL
• Some URL shorteners like twt.tl also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts

But on the negative side, URL shorteners also introduce:

• An additional single point of failure: when a URL shortener service is down (or corrupt) the link won’t work
• Additional load time for a page to fully load

WatchMouse website monitoring monitored the most popular URL shorteners for one month to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 14 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:

Uptime is still clearly an issue for some of the URL shorteners. This is important because it has a direct impact on the uptime availability of the website the URL shortener actually directs to. Only goo.gl and twt.tl score a perfect 100%.

The performance results can be seen in the chart below:

According to our data, Facebook’s fb.me is by far the slowest. It adds over two seconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link.  And, quite a few others still take over half a second of the page load time, which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience.

Another interesting thing we noticed is that only a few of the URL shorteners optimized their name servers (DNS) for international use – i.e. it takes half a second for some of the URL shorteners just to lookup the IP address that is needed for a browser to retrieve a web page. That means, that while it might be fast for a visitor from the US, a visitor from Asia might get some extra waiting time when using snurl.com, for example.

And, while bitly.pro might offer more options than the free bit.ly (like having your own domain name), the paid version is also slower on average than its free counterpart.

Some details about how we measured all this: The URL shorteners were checked every five minutes from one of the 50 WatchMouse global website monitoring stations. For each short URL, only the redirection was measured, not the actual loading of the target page. The redirection was expected to be done within eight seconds without any errors (like when a server error occurred or if the expected target URL location was not found in the http header). If that time was exceeded or a second error was established, WatchMouse verified the results using another of its monitoring stations and the result was counted as either poor availability or unavailable.

We plan to continue to monitor URL shorteners and as of today, plan to share the results publicly through our brand new website portal: http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. Here’s a screenshot:

You can also receive Twitter alerts so you know immediately when URL shorteners go down by following http://twitter.com/url_shorteners.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think.  Are URL shorteners useful or can you live without them? Does the additional time to load a page concern you?

Update: as pointed out at in some comments here and at other blogs that followed up on this post: The results of bitly.pro shortheners like tcrn.ch is affected greatly by the name servers of the bitly.pro clients, and those servers are not controlled by the bit.ly people. In the performance chart above the resolve time of tcrn.ch is indeed responsible for the lower overall performance. Binged.it, another bitly.pro client is actually faster, due to a great worldwide DNS performance we saw from our 45 monitoring stations in 26 countries. Also, the bitly.Pro service is actually free!