Web 2.slow
Francis Turner
October 5th, 2009
Easyjet has recently updated its booking site to use a newer, slicker AJAX/Web 2.0 GUI
Unfortunately the new booking process seems to be more hassle and slower than the old one. More than once when I used it recently I had to hit reload to get a page to display or to get the next page to show up.
I’m not singling out Easyjet for criticism here, I’ve seen similar “improvements” on other sites, both eCommerce and general interest. Part of the problem is that web 2.0 seems to load web servers differently (not necessarily more but placing the load in different places) and so when a site moves to the new interface various services are hit harder than they used to be and get overloaded. In particular web 2.0 sites seem to make more, but smaller, database transactions and I suspect that this is the heart of the problem as the existing database will be tuned to larger but fewer transactions.
To add to this it is entirely possible that Web 2.0 sites get hit by a perception in slowness that is in fact due to their attempts to provide a faster service. Because a Web 2.0 page will load (as far as the browser is concerned) quicker the delay as the bits of the middle of the page are loaded on top becomes noticeable. When there was just one loading thing at the top even if it was as slow or slower we put it down to network issues as opposed to something on the page, thus we were more tolerant of the slowness.
Of course sometimes it is the lack of horsepower in the client that causes the slowdown. By moving more of the processing to the client, web 2.0 sites suffer when clients lack the speed and resources needed to display the page. Some sites with masses of Web 2.0 content such as facebook and gmail have come up with special “lite” versions which load faster and do not place such a burden on the client browser. We may well see more of this as time goes on.