I’ve been looking at some Talos pageload benchmark data lately. The intention is gleaning enough information to decide whether having a separate cold page load benchmark is worthwhile. Our Talos pageload benchmark loads a number of sites a specified number of times (currently 25), records times for all of those, discards the highest time per page (usually the first page load), and averages everything else. The working hypothesis is that the 1st and/or 2nd iteration of each site load might be worth tracking separately.

To that end, I’ve been writing a lot of shell scripts to munge benchmark numbers, running those numbers through gnuplot, and staring at the output. One of the graph styles I’ve been using is the Q-Q plot, which I use for comparing data like so:

Sort the page load times for the 1st iteration; Sort the page load times for the nth iteration (usually 2nd, 5th, or 10th, the exact number doesn’t seem to matter a great deal); Plot numbers from step 1 vs. numbers from step 2 and eyeball the graph.

There’s a fair amount of data to crunch (8000 runs times 100 sites times 25 runs divided across 8 operating systems), but the most interesting thing to come out of this experiment so far is consistently slower cold page loads on OS X 10.7 on certain sites. Graphing most sites across OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8, the graphs look like this:

These sorts of graphs are exactly what you’d want to see across OS versions: improving load times along warm page load, cold page load, or both.

Before pointing out the sites, it’s worth noting that the pages used in the benchmark are representative of these sites as they appeared ~1 year ago: things may have changed and the pages may have been altered slightly to avoid fetching resources off the network, etc. The sites are:

56.com

alibaba.com

bild.de

cnet.com

deviantart.com

etsy.com

en.wikipedia.org

filestube.com

foxnews.com

guardian.co.uk

huffingtonpost.com

hatena.ne.jp

icanhascheezburger.com

linkedin.com

mashable.com

mail.ru

nicovideo.jp

noimpactman.typepad.com

orange.fr

spiegel.de

thepiratebay.org

wsj.com

whois.domaintools.com

I’ll show a few representative graphs here; you can examine graphs for all the sites in the benchmark if you wish.

What’s so interesting about these graphs is that the maximum cold page load time for OS X 10.6 and 10.8 is barely the minimum cold page load time for OS X 10.7. The warm page load times are similar, too.

mozilla.com doesn’t appear in the above list, but is notable for exhibiting significantly worse cold load performance on OS 10.8:

I’m probably not going to dive any deeper on this issue right now; instead, this discrepancy will get filed away under “interesting things that turn up when you look at cold load performance specifically”. Once I reach some sort of conclusion on whether benchmarking cold page load separately is worthwhile, then I’ll come back to the interesting issues found along the way. If anybody has any theories about why these pages exhibit this discrepancy, I’d love to hear them!

Tags: talos