Seattle vs Rest of World

16 July 2013

Tags

  • Fairy Tale Twist
  • Performance

Comparing load times in Seattle and China.

  • Bandwidth is simply 7X that of Seattle
  • Not much we can do before getting into our code: ** 3.45s until the preloader starts 5.5s until the launcher starts 7.5s until the first file is downloaded
  • We’re spending 37% blocked (waiting for a connection), 24% waiting (on the server) and 35% receiving, compared to no blocking, 26% waiting and 16% receiving (with 40% unaccounted for). The wait time is consistently ~200ms regardless of file size and gzip compression.
  • cdn-1 and 3 spend 2X the time of cdn-2 and 4, this is true of Seattle as they are responsible for 2x the data.

** Recommendation: Consider using 6 parallel connections, cdn1-6 on the CDN.

  • DNS lookup is not an issue, the first few calls cost 42ms and these **are all resolved before our SWF is loaded.
  • Recommendation: Consider batching files** “Combining six files into one” … “improved file performance 8%” – Yahoo developer network It appears that ~75KB mark is where this starts to pay off.
  • Best loading optimization is to not load anything** Optimizations so far have focussed on the first time user experience, pushing the cost into the second time user experience. Re-recommend on-demand loading MP3 and animation data.
  • Revisit SWF and remove dead code