Performance Issues Plague Cloud-Based Applications

Increased Complexity Leads to Increased Risk for Web Apps

The Web community is working on ways to mitigate these problems. For example, modern browsers load other content elements while they're waiting for JavaScript to execute, and developers have come up with various clever techniques to eliminate script bottlenecks. But these one-sided optimizations can only get you so far, and they're difficult to do right.

"Think about it," says Steve Souter, a performance evangelist at Google and author of the books "High Performance Web Sites" and "Even Faster Web Sites." He adds, "We're taking a chunk of HTML that might also include CSS, JavaScript, and Flash, and stuffing it into another page ... It's not surprising that they can, and do, significantly degrade the performance of Web pages, and in some cases can cause a Web site to fail entirely."

Part of the problem lies in the fact that such content-integration efforts often lack cohesive management and oversight. "Integrating third-party content into a Web page would be a complex project to pull off for two teams working in the same company," Souter says. "In the case of ads, the two teams work at two different companies. In fact, the developers creating the ad probably never interact with the team building the main Web site."

That's not to say that everyone will share the responsibility for site slowdowns, however. Rest assured that when site performance degrades, the user will place the blame squarely on the site's own brand: The external content providers will remain virtually anonymous.

Baby Steps Toward the Web as a First-Class App Platform

For now, Web application developers and architects should be sure to educate themselves about the potential bottlenecks and other pitfalls inherent in distributed, cloud-like Web applications. Souter's books are a good place to start, and Google has recently launched a Web site dedicated to developing best practices for JavaScript performance.

In the long run, however, Web services providers and consumers will need to work together to develop standards of practice for the cloud-based Internet. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has formed a working group and offers best practices for ad providers to improve load times. This is a good start, but clearly there's still much more work to be done.

One of the more troubling aspects of the current situation is that it tends to favor larger customers. Wal-Mart or a major sports league might be in a position to demand comprehensive SLAs and developer accountability of their external content providers, but a struggling newspaper publisher might not -- to say nothing of even smaller clients.

That's why it's of critical importance that the Web community work to increase not just browser performance, but the performance of cross-organizational Web development teams. As sites and services become increasingly interconnected, we need to come up with new ways to communicate, collaborate, and cooperate to make distributed, cross-site development efforts run more smoothly. Only in this way will the cloud-based Web flourish into a reliable, first-class application development platform.