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Once upon a time, I drank coffee purely to wake myself up in the morning or to stay awake during a late night coding marathon. Eventually, I gained an appreciation for the different flavors, smells, and textures to be found in different coffees and brewing methods. That appreciation has grown into a pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee which, while it may never be achieved, provides me with a fun hobby as well as an endless supply of amazing coffee.

Performance tuning a website is another of those endless pursuits wherein you may never actually reach a happy ending.

Is there such a thing as a perfectly performing website? The answer to that question is much like the perfect cup of coffee: perfection lies in the eye of the beholder. While we may not ever be able to achieve a perfectly performing website, we can certainly define goals for what would be considered a well performing site. And by precisely measuring aspects of the site’s performance, we can know if our adjustments are moving us in the right direction or not.

Of course, when defining performance goals, like any project, it’s best to begin at the beginning. In this case there’s no better place to start than a nice cup of Kenya Peaberry, brewed in a manual pour-over to bring out the amazing citrus fruitiness (with a touch of spice). Mmmm, if that’s not nirvana, it sure is close! Now we can jump right in.

Defining Performance Goals

As I mentioned, we need to define goals in order to know where we’re going with the performance tuning, otherwise we’re likely to get people working on random performance improvements that may or may not meet our business requirements. The more specific the goals, the better. Here are a few ideas to get us going:

• The front page must load in under X seconds.
• The site must support at least Y concurrent users.
• Popular entry points to the site must load in under Z seconds.

The important point here is to create an authoritative list which will get everyone on the same page and understand exactly what they’re working towards. Even if you are a team of one person, this is still a great way to define an endpoint for your (current) performance work.