I recently saw this post on Etsy’s blog and found it inspiring – you don’t typically see retailers (or any companies for that matter) sharing performance data. Even more impressive is the fact that they posted this on their primary blog as opposed to their engineering blog. To me this says that Etsy really cares about performance, and wants all of their customers to be aware that it is a priority. After reading that post I immediately wanted to share some Wayfair data – and this is my attempt to do that (maybe I can get it cross-posted to our main blog
Here at Wayfair we care a lot about performance, and the business case for having a faster site is well documented. To keep tabs on our site performance we have synthetic monitoring tools like Catchpoint, real user monitoring tools like Coradiant (now a part of BMC software), and our own home-brew monitoring instrumented in our ASP and PHP code. We have also had great success using StatsD in conjunction with Graphite. Though we use the ruby client, StatsD was started as an open source NodeJS project from Etsy (I promise we aren’t stalking you guys). The numbers that I am sharing are from Coradiant, and measure “host time” which is defined as the time between the last packet of the request and the first packet of the response as measured by a network tap. Without further ado, here are the numbers for our highest traffic pages. These numbers are all in milliseconds, and were measured between 9AM and 5PM Eastern Time on a Wednesday, so they should be indicative of real world performance.