The statistics of Web Performance Analysis

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If you're interested in measuring real user web performance, you'll find tools like boomerang or episodes quite handy. Some popular web frameworks even have modules that make it easy to add them to your site. However, what does one do once one has collected the data. How do you filter out the noise and get meaningful insights from the data?

In this talk, I'll go over the techniques we've picked up by analyzing millions of datapoints daily. Some simple rules to filter out invalid data, and the statistics to analyze and make sense of what's left. Do you use the mean, median or mode? What about the geometric mean and standard deviation? How confident are we in the results? And finally, why should we care?

This talk should help you gain useful insights from a histogram, or at the very least point you in the right direction for further analysis.

Philip Tellis (http://tech.bluesmoon.info/) (@bluesmoon (https://twitter.com/bluesmoon)) started LogNormal (http://www.lognormal.com/) to carry out research on the real user performance impact of various design decisions. LogNormal was recently acquired by SOASTA (http://www.soasta.com/), Inc. and Philip is now the Chief Architect at SOASTA. Prior to starting LogNormal, Philip worked with Yahoo!'s performance and security teams where he built the boomerang (https://github.com/lognormal/boomerang/) JavaScript library (among other things). When he's not hacking on something, Philip spends his time cooking, reading, biking and kayaking down the Charles with his wife.

We are at Meetup HQ (https://www.meetup.com/jobs/) this month. And they also provide food and beer!

Our "geekaways" are sponsored by Catchpoint (http://www.catchpoint.com/)

Agenda:

6:30 - Arrive to Meetup HQ, meet other members
6:45 - Event starts
7:00 - The statistics of Web Performance Analysis (Philip Tellis)
8:00 - Q&A
8:15 - "Books and Stuff" geekaways
8:30 - Open Discussion, Networking

Location:

Meetup HQ166 Crosby Street 9th floor, Suite 901
New York, NY

Attention, it's new entrance on Crosby street!

Directions on Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/VNgzq

Entrance on StreetView: http://goo.gl/maps/QarWP

Our Sponsors:

Akamai® (http://www.akamai.com/) is the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere.

Strangeloop (http://www.strangeloop.com/) provides advanced front-end optimization (FEO) solutions to companies like eBay/PayPal, Visa, and O'Reilly Media.

Catchpoint (http://www.catchpoint.com/) is sponsoring us by providing 10% discount to our members and books to raffle.