Google uses HttpWatch to Speed Up Gmail

May 05th, 2008 - 11:52AM

There’s a post over on the Gmail blog by Wiltse Carpenter, the Tech Lead for Gmail Performance, about how they used HttpWatch and other tools to speed up the login for Gmail. Here’s what they said about HttpWatch: “The Httpwatch plug-in for Internet Explorer was one that proved easy to use and provided us with most of the information we needed. It really helps that we can capture and save browser traces with it too.” To reduce the time required to login they looked for ways to minimize the number of requests and reduce the overhead of each request: “We spent … Continue reading →

Why is Google so Fast?

November 11th, 2007 - 9:00AM

It’s no coincidence that the most successful search engine on the planet is also the fastest to return results. Here are some time charts from HttpWatch for Google and its two closest competitors; Yahoo and Live.com: Google.com returns its results page in 0.155 seconds: Live.com returns its results page in 0.619 seconds: Yahoo returns its results page in 1.131 seconds: These screen shots were created by visiting the home page of each search engine with an empty cache and then entering a search term while recording with the free, Basic Edition of HttpWatch After clicking the ‘Search’ button, the results … Continue reading →