Last week Microsoft bought GitHub and there was a flood of “the sky is falling” from the anti-Microsoft trolls as well as the typical knee-jerk reactionary type folks we find in the tech industry. It reminded me of the time four years ago when SolarWinds bought Pingdom. The day the deal went down I read comments from current users saying they would start looking for a new service. We hadn’t even touched anything and people were in a panic.
So, after the events last week, it got me thinking how I have not written many (or any?) posts about available free tools such as Pingdom. So, here’s one for today. I will use the free website performance tool from Pingdom to do performance testing against this blog. I’ll run a quick test against my “Hey Cortana” post from last week, with Disqus enabled at first then disabled.
Here’s the result with Disqus enabled:
13 seconds to load the page? That seems like a bit of a drag to anyone trying to read my post. I know I wouldn’t wait around that long for a page to load (and from my page stats, I can tell you don’t either).
Further down the Pingdom test results page, I find details on the number of requests and content size broken down by domain:
I see 14 requests from Disqus, with a sum total of 413.27KB. Roughly one-third of the entire 1.2MB page size, just from Disqus.
Now, let’s have a look at the same page, but this time with Disqus disabled:
The page size is half as much as before, and the load time is about 90% faster. The total number of requests went from 156 down to 52, a nice decrease.
Let’s look at the content and requests by domain:
The Disqus requests are gone. As a result, this blog will perform better for my readers.
Disqus no longer serves any purpose for me or my readers. As a result, I have removed it from this blog. Thanks to Pingdom I was able to identify this easy change to improve the performance of my blog. I have some additional cleanup to do for this blog. I will continue to use Pingdom to help me navigate the location of performance tuning opportunities.
If you are so inclined I would advocate that you try Pingdom for your own blogs and websites.
Do you need special permissions to see the images in your post? The first large blank gap, between “Here’s the result with Disqus enabled” and “13 seconds to load the page?” seemed just like a somewhat cynical quip, but none of the others appear either!
Oh interesting!
I leave a comment about your post having no images and press Post Comment.
The comment entry goes, but the comment vanishes and is not echoed on-page, so I can’t see it.
The images, OTOH, are now visible!
Interesting! (Is this how Akismet works?)
I’ve no idea why there are issues with the images, or if it is related to Akismet. Sorry for any trouble viewing the post.