InformationWeek

As the time limit for how fast a Web page should download before a visitor loses patience and goes elsewhere keeps dropping, companies are forced to compare themselves to the highest-performing sites. The need for speed has grown as more businesses look to E-commerce to provide new and growing sources of revenue, and as competitors pop up all over the Web. Building a super-fast Web site isn't cheap or easy--but it's the goal of just about every business on the Internet, because a slow download can lose a customer just as easily as a rude salesperson can.

Time was that companies experiencing rapid growth of their Web sites simply threw more processing power and bandwidth at the problem. But the limits to that approach are becoming apparent--if your site is poorly designed or architected, adding more and faster servers and fatter pipes to connect to the Internet won't help much. Sophisticated Web-site operators are redesigning and rearchitecting their sites using a variety of techniques, including caching, routing, off-loading, and load balancing, to speed delivery of pages. They're also using hosting and testing services to improve performance. And some are monitoring the performance of the Internet itself. After all, it doesn't matter how fast your site is if the Internet is clogged with traffic.

Victoria's Secret knows about performance problems. A year and a half ago, the retailer of lingerie and swimsuits used an ad during the telecast of the Super Bowl to promote a simultaneous Webcast fashion show. More than 1 million people attempted to log on to the show, swamping the site, slowing response time, and leaving many frustrated visitors viewing only error messages. "We had no idea that many people would leave the Super Bowl last year and go to the Internet and Victoriassecret.com," says Timothy Plzak, director of advanced technology for Intimate Brands Inc., the parent company of Victoria's Secret, in Columbus, Ohio.

The company was determined to do better. So last month, when Victoriassecret.com conducted its second fashion show on the Web, it used every trick in the book to boost performance. "This year was really about how you absorb and maintain a name-brand experience during a burst of traffic like that," says Plzak.

The company spent $9 million to prepare for the 55-minute Webcast. Victoriassecret.com uses Sun Solaris servers running Netscape's Enterprise Server software as its Web server and IBM's Net.Commerce software as its shopping engine. The company also uses IBM's Universal Database and a customized middleware system for real-time integration with its inventory system. To serve up content for the second Webcast fashion show, Victoriassecret.com worked with IBM Global Services to create a dedicated hosting facility in North Carolina; last year, it used a shared IBM hosting facility. The company also used load-balancing and traffic-management software from Radware Inc. to route network requests to the appropriate server. The company used the Yahoo Broadcast network to host the streaming media portion of the site. The Akamai Technologies Inc. network was used to co-host the Victoria's Secret eLounge, a separate site for users looking for static images. This year, Victoria's Secret also co-located several streaming media servers within America Online's network to serve its audience and in many other places along several Internet backbones, according to Plzak.

In addition, Microsoft took over the transactional element of the Webcast. When visitors clicked on a "purchase" button as items were showcased, Microsoft collected the buying data and sent it back to the Victoria's Secret site once traffic levels returned to normal.

As a result of the multifaceted technology effort, about 2 million viewers were able to watch the Webcast. Though some potential customers were still unable to log on to the live show, "We viewed it as a technical success," says Plzak. "We met our architected goals. We accomplished a technically superior performance compared to last year's."

There's third-party proof for that contention: Keynote Systems Inc., which measures Web-site performance, says the average time to access the site during the one-hour Webcast was 5.0 seconds, with 97.9% availability.

Victoria's Secret faced several problems--a live Web show, bandwidth-gobbling streaming video, and millions of simultaneous viewers from around the world--and dealt with them by architecting the site and supporting services for those specific sets of demands. Each Web site is different, designed to achieve different goals--and understanding that is the crucial first step in building a blazingly fast Web site, analysts say.

For example, most Web sites today feature graphics and images. Web pages filled with many large graphics, or sites that include securely encrypted sessions, require a sophisticated infrastructure or the ability to offload some kinds of traffic to other servers or sections of a network. But you may not need everything you think you do. Heavily trafficked sites such as Yahoo and eBay are able to provide such rapidly loading pages partly because their Web sites have been designed with fewer large files or images to download.

"You can't sell without imagery--imagery is critical to sell things such as apparel and footwear," says Mark Loncar, VP and executive producer for Fogdog Inc., an online sporting goods store in Redwood City, Calif. "But speed is very valuable for the E-commerce experience. So then it becomes an issue of file-size management as well as the number of images that you're using. Number of items and server hits can actually slow things down more than large files sometimes."

To facilitate fast downloads of images, the Fogdog.com site has been designed to be "flat," so customers click through only two or three pages to get to what they want. That ends up minimizing the overall numbers of pages that must be downloaded, reducing the load on servers. Fogdog.com also uses static pages, meaning the pages are already built, instead of a dynamic site that has an engine that builds pages on the fly. "We know that our site is much faster than dynamic sites--I would guess somewhere on the order of 20% to 30% faster," Loncar says.

Once again, the right Web architecture depends on the goals of the Web site. "The application has to be in sync with the infrastructure and the demand," says Jeanne Schaaf, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. "If you're doing video, you're going to have an entirely different architecture from just text." That's the problem with trying to address Web performance only through scalable hardware, she says. "I can start off with a simple site with a low number of hits," Schaaf notes. "But if the site takes off, I need to rearchitect to handle the onslaught."

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