Importance of Operations and Performance

Notes from Velocity Conference continue:
Next up is a Keynote by Artur Bergman (Wikia). Wikia runs 7000 Wikis and has 400 million page views per month.

• Google, Yahoo and Amazon are what people rely on
• Friendster.com, Twitter and boo.com have serious reliability problem

Value of performance/ reliability

• brand value (they rely on you)
• more page views (fixed amount of time + faster site)
  

Match user expectations:

• World of Warcraft:
• $520 million in profit last year
• 99% reliable
• down every week, scheduled
• server crash
  

"We pay them money, so we have to accept the downtime."

Operations:

• efficient use of resources
• end user performance
• reliability
• bad operations wastes R&D and cost of sale money
  

Business

• cost per pageview. How many actually know this?
• cost per page
• revenue CPM - cost per pageview
• Gross margin
  

Reliability example:

• 20% of wikia pages
• 200ms -> 15s to load
• 35% reduction of page views out of the slow pages
• 15% reduction of the fast pages
• slow pages made people abandon the site.
  

Happy users - Lower cost

• for the users: service industry
• for the business: cost per page view, lower capex.
• VC love to give money to IBM, HP, Dell
• better for the environment.
  

May performance project:

• 50% cpu usage cost
• delay investment 6 months
• 3 engineers - 4 weeks
  

Cache miss

• 300ms -> 190 ms

Perception

• Ads
• Ads are slow
• Load ads after content load
  

Dramatic change:

• significant % increase in pageviews
• We lose money
• but edits increase
• Stay in loose and simple area, stay away from the complexity.
  

Yet another great presentation at Velocity!