MSDN Social + fine-tuned SQL 2008 = speed, sweet speed
Today we released an update with a number of performance enhancements, some of which I referred to in my previous post. I decided that now was a good time to compare our performance with some other leading sites that we might be compared to. I opened Fiddler and ran the following scenarios on MSDN Social, Delicious, and Digg (using IE7):
- Load the default home page, not signed in
- Sign in
- Navigate away, then reload the home page signed in
- Filter the site by a tag
- Remove the filter
- Apply a different filter (Longest time window for MSDN Social, Recent for Delicious, and nothing for Digg, as there really wasn't an equivalent)
I compared 3 key stats that affect perf in different ways: the number of server requests for each user action, the number of bytes sent to the browser, and the total time for the page to load. Here's the results:
Our one weak spot is the time for page load when you change the filter to "Most Popular Ever", but I'm pretty ecstatic about these results. The response time is fantastic, and the low number of bytes sent down the wire means that perf should be great all over the world.
Hey, if I can use it over the shared wi-fi of the commuter bus I'm on while I type this, that's a good sign that you've got a well-optimized site.
Shout out to our engineering team! You guys ROCK.
