Yahoo Mail, Ajax and Your Server

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, April 5, 2006 @ 12:57 pm

I recently did a little unscientific comparison between the old Yahoo mail and the new Beta Ajax interface. The idea was to strap a non-caching proxy in front of the browser for a day each, clear the cache and see how they compared.

I fully expected to see the increase in requests and a decrease in request size that everyone talked about. I did see the former, but not much of the latter, as it turns out. The average request size was smaller for the Ajax version, but not that much smaller.

While this test wasn't scientific -- I just used my yahoo mail account as I usually do throughout the day -- my educated guess is that the temptation to add lots of features to the new whiz-bang interface is the culprit.

Here, without further ado, are some of the facts and figures (count is number of requests. All others are in bytes):

Ajax Yahoo Mail

Count	9848
Average	3392.27
Median	543.5
90th Percentile	6593.2
25th Percentile	94
10th percentile	43
75th percentile	1604.75

Old Yahoo Mail

Count	7329
Average	4153.74
Median	195.5
90th Percentile	15052.4
25th Percentile	70
10th percentile	43
75th percentile	1880

What does this mean to you and your infrastructure requirements? Unless you exercise incredible discipline in pushing back on feature creep, you are likely to have Ajax apps that make more and bigger requests.

Remember when 1MB was more computer memory than anyone would ever need, or when car makers used the extra energy in those hybrid vehicles for greater fuel efficiency instead of more power of hybrid SUV's?

Topics: Ajax Performance, Application Development, Web Development

Comments (1)

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Comments: 1 so far

Erp Application…

Thanks for creating this blog. I thought it was a very interesting read. It is so interesting reading other peoples personal take on a subject….

Trackback by Erp Application, Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 11:01 am

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