I don’t think it’s restricted to the average user.  Something like CNN.com actually has a dedicated group of SA’s.  Persistent connections are enabled by default on most modern web server configs so it would have to either be explicitly disabled or running a really old version (I can see both being explained pretty easily).

Interesting question – would a hosting company benefit more by having gzip enabled or disabled?  With it enabled, the host will consume more CPU serving pages and network usage will go down.  Since they get paid for bandwidth usage but not CPU (usually), are they actually incented to not enable it?

-Pat

 

From: exceptional-performance@yahoogroups.com [mailto:exceptional-performance@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Chris Korhonen
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 10:08 AM
To: exceptional-performance@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [exceptional-performance] Simple things people aren't doing

 

That's interesting but too be honest I'm not totally shocked - the average user tends not to get deep (by choice or simply due to lack of access) into the kind of web server configuration required to enable the likes of gzip or persistent connections.

I was actually doing some of this at the weekend on a personal site which let me to notice that many web hosts don't even enable these as part of their standard hosting package.

I'm wondering if this is a scenario where we need to be more pro-active working with the various software vendors (or as a stopgap, the web hosts?), asking them to enable such optimizations as default?

Chris

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Patrick Meenan <PatMeenan@aol.com> wrote:

So, with pagetest  having been up for 8 months now with close to 26,000 tests having been run I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some observations based on what I've been seeing in the test results.  I have more details here  but basically, it's amazing how many sites do not have persistent connections or GZIP enabled (and this is from the self-selected group that cares enough about performance to run tests).

It's very frustrating to look at the test results every day (I usually spot check the test log and see what the results look like) and not be able to reach through to the users and tell them the simple things they could be doing to make things faster (under the assumption that they are overwhelmed with the current optimization report).

I didn't even get into it because it's harder for people to solve but universally everyone seems to be REALLY bad at caching their static assets (most of the repeat view tests are covered in yellow for 304's).

In the next couple of weeks I plan on parsing through all of the test results and generating some stats (averages for the times, % of sites that fail each of the categories, etc).  If there's anything in particular you'd like to see just shoot me a note and I'll see if I can get it in.

Thanks,

-Pat