Troubleshooting Web performance problems checklist
It is a fact of life – Website technical glitches happen. Most recently we saw that several retailers experienced severe Websites outages and glitches this past Holiday shopping Season. From Australia [AS1]~#1 retailer Myer Website outages that lasted almost one week to CVS mobile Website hiccups, to Belk Website~slowdown on Thanksgiving and Black Friday to Walmart outage on Cyber Tuesday, many retailers run into issues that hurt sales, brand and revenue. Get the full scoop in our 2013 Holiday recap blog.
Unfortunately, problems can happen anywhere: in your datacenter, in your cloud providers, on your virtualized resources or in your application code.
Here is a quick questionnaire to help you guide your triage and troubleshooting efforts:
- Is my site slow only during certain hours of the day?~ Your servers could be overstrained at peak times. Check key performance metrics like CPU usage, memory, disk, processes, services and network utilization for every server involved in the process of delivering content to your end-users.
- Are only certain webpages slow?~ If you have third-party components on specific pages (ads, feeds, Social Media widgets…) they could be the root cause, so check their response time.
- Do I run multiple plugins or modules? Review performance metrics[AS1]~ of individual HTML components such as JavaScript, CSS and images to find root cause. Also view throughput of webservers running main domains and sub-domains.
- Is my website slow from one location or several locations? ~Severe response time discrepancies across geographical locations may indicate that it’s time to explore a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- Is First Byte slow (longer than one second)? This indicates slowness at the server level itself, usually traced back to buggy application code (such as slow SQL queries) or plugins. Go deep into your application code to visualize Web transactions end to end, and track performance metrics for all components starting from URLs to SQL queries.
- Do I see a high number of Requests (more than 100)? If so, my website requires the browser to make a lot of connections to display content. Displaying less third-party content, combining JavaScript and CSS files, or enabling caching headers makes the browser do less work.
- Am I working with a cloud provider like Amazon? The problem could be on their side, so review the health and availability of your EC2 instances (CPU utilization, Network Traffic, Disk I/O) and EBS volumes. When working with RDS instances, analyze availability, CPU utilization and Storage Space metrics.
- Do I have virtualized servers? The problem could be VMware ESX/ESXi servers running short on resources. Analyze performance trends across VMware servers and virtual machines, and focus on CPU, Disk utilization, memory and network utilization.
- Am I seeing problems with multi-step Web transactions? Examine end-to-end performance reports and drill down into each individual step to zoom into the problem area.
- What services do I utilize (SMTP, POP, DNS, FTP…)? DNS is known to be a problematic spot, so run a quick Site24x7 DNS lookup test to know if you have an issue there.
As you can see, your Web operations have many potential points of failure, so you need a holistic solution that gives you one single view into everything-Web: Web application code, cloud providers, datacenter infrastructure, virtualized resources, and response time across locations. And that is exactly what you get with Site24x7! Powerful, agile and cost-effective IT Management delivered as a Service from the cloud.
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Good luck in your troubleshooting efforts!