By Robert Castley

In January this year, all of the social networking sites monitored performed fairly well in terms of availability with eight out of the ten sites scoring an average success rate of over 99% for the month. However, several of the sites struggled with response times with Facebook being the only site that achieved a download time of less than one second.

Bebo and Hi5 suffered the most, both taking more than four seconds on average throughout January. The very appeal of social networking sites is the ability to instantly share information – status updates, photos and links – with online contacts, however if users are unable to easily access a site, it is likely that they will become frustrated and will browse to an alternative site to update their friends. It is essential for social networking sites to ensure optimal performance and availability during popular events such as important sport matches. During last year’s World Cup, many Twitter users were greeted with the “Fail Whale” shortly after goals were scored. This notification contains the message, “Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again.”

Twitter responded on its blog by saying that it was working through tweaks to the system in order to provide greater stability at a time when facing record traffic. It is clear that an influx in site visitors is inevitable on such occasions and so site owners need to ensure that their site is prepared for large volumes of visitors in advance to ensure that they’re able to provide an easily accessible service to ensure that users continue to return to the site when looking to post online.

About the author

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for nearly two years. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces. Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the world’s most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses – Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla! Robert has a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies.

About the company

Keynote Systems is the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring. It provides companies with solutions for continuously improving the online experience. Founded in 1995, Keynote provides testing, monitoring and measurement products and services for any enterprise including online portals, e-commerce sites, B2B sites, mobile operators and mobile infrastructure providers. Keynote products and services help companies improve customer experience in four areas: Web performance, mobile quality, streaming and real user experience testing.