HTTP Archive Mobile–Very much Alpha

I had a chance this morning to take a quick peak at the latest offering from S.Souders and Blaze.io It’s an attempt to become as they say in their words “a permanent repository for mobile performance data.”

The only problem is that it lacks any meaningful context and does NOT appear to be at all accurate. For example here’s one of the stats that’s posted…

• The New York Times is in the top 5 pages with the most JavaScript with 230 kB on desktop and 326 kB on mobile – 94 kB more JavaScript on mobile than desktop.

Really? How do we know that? Where’s the actual comparison test of the desktop version and the mobile version. To check this out I went to Blaze.io’s site and ran a test using a iOS 4 Here’s the actual report they generated… link

In short, on the iPhone they downloaded 1.4MB of data in 13.82 seconds. If you look at the HAR data (link) it doesn’t even “redirect” to the Mobile web site (something featured as part of the HTTP archive).

So just for grins I ran exactly the same test on my own desktop. I have a 22Mbps Comcast connection. The total download was 1.8MB in 8.83 seconds.

Think about that for a moment. The iPhone is only 5 seconds slower than a 22Mbps connection to a desktop browser. Clearly something is very wrong here.

Next I ran the same test on Firefox with firebug (cache cleared). This time I got 1.1MB in 8 seconds

I’m sorry to say that without a lot more context the HTTP Archive can not be relied on to revel accurate performance data.

Twitter’s Mobile Site is still too big and too slow

I thought I’d take a look at what Twitter is up to with it’s Mobile web page. It’s pretty fascinating data – and as you’ll see, they’re still sending way too much data to the phone.

First screen shot – the report of My Sprint HTC loading mobile.twitter.com – 287k in 7.5 seconds

 

Now to see what’s inside that page load. You can see the hot spots causing the performance problem.

 

So how about we go even deeper…this is just part of a much bigger report (it goes to line 88) and shows the inside story on how Android’s browser is processing the data. Some very interesting links.

Technorati Tags: Twitter

Mobile Performance–Wi-Fi vs. Cellular using a Sprint HTC smartphone

For today’s test it was a simple drag race… Go to Vodafone’s UK web site (link) from Colorado USA using my Sprint HTC. First test was with Wi-Fi turned on, second test was without.

Here’s how the results looked using our new Mobile Performance Web service. Check out the cool icons underneath the test URL… they’re Cell strength, Wi-Fi strength, GPS and the cache cleared before load.

 

Wi-Fi ON: 14 seconds to download 662k

 

Cell Tower Only (ASU was 99, 85dbm): 23 seconds to download 662k

 

Let’s put that into context… using Wi-Fi it’s 64% faster than using Cell.  What a difference a radio network makes over “copper”.

Check out our new service 3PMobile to learn even more about Mobile Web performance.