Facebook the slowest social site on the web
January 10, 2008
According to Watchmouse, a useful looking site offering a suite of web performance, load testing and monitoring tools that I’ve been evaluating.
Watchmouse performed some tests on most of the major social websites of the moment. The Watchmouse Site Performance Index quantifies the users perception of website speed and availability using the load time of the homepage with added penalties for components that fail to load. A very useful metric.
Out of 104 sites monitored 51 showed a Site Performance Index of over 1000 which indicates a slow load time which could result in a poor user experience.
Facebook came off worst of the lot. I’ve been finding Facebook increasingly frustrating with it’s slow response times. I think it’s time they put some of that funding to good use and increase the size of their data centres (or maybe look at their architecture).
The full results of the testing can be seen here.
