Facebook lowest on performance

Facebook might be making waves but the immensely popular social networking site does not fare well when it comes to Site Performance Index (SPI).

A research report by website monitoring company WatchMouse ranks Facebook as the worst for availability.

The report finds out that popular social networking sites are often slow to open or load properly. WatchMouse monitored the Web 2.0 sites, listed on Wikipedia, on the basis of time taken to load.

Faceparty performs the best with an SPI of 303, meaning users can access the site most frequently and in the fastest time. Of the 104 sites monitored, 51 showed an SPI of 1000 or more, making them very slow in load time.

Other well known networking sites like Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us also feature in the report.

The research report goes on the say that most sites still have a lot to work on if they want their users to keep returning to their site. The research shows that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load.

"It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance," says Mark Pors, CTO at WatchMouse.

"It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly. Using Ajax technology, they should be able to work more effectively. For now the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance," suggests Pors.


Source : www.ciol.com