Both Paramount and Universal celebrated their 100th anniversary last year, which is a long time to be in the movie business. Arguably, both have made some good, some great, and some bad movies. But, during this year's Super Bowl, Paramount showed Universal how to design a ‘fast and furious' web site that stood up to the flood of visitors during and after the game.

This article will discuss not only how Paramount was able to do it, but will also compare Universal and Paramount's Super Bowl web site results, which shines a light on key factors for successful web performance: fewer connections to fewer hosts requesting smaller objects produces a smaller page size having a positive impact on page response time.

To begin, Universal and Paramount are near equals when it comes to their web age. Jumping over to http://web.archive.org, I found Paramount launched its first site 16 years ago in 1997 and Universal's first site came online 15 years ago in 1998. With the same amount of experience on the Web, it's interesting to explore why one company performed better during this year's Super Bowl.

As a result of analyzing web page performance for nearly six years, my experience tells me that the reasons some sites succeed and others don't can fall into three general categories - corporate culture, resources, and experience and knowledge. But even today, with so much information available on web site performance fundamentals, I often see companies forgetting the basics.

Why Universal Was not ‘Fast and Furious'
Looking at Paramount and Universal's site performance for the period from 5 p.m. EST until 11 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 3 (Super Bowl Sunday), I noticed some big performance differences between the two sites. For starters, Paramount's homepage average response time was 966 milliseconds while Universal's was 11.727 seconds.

Comparison of the two sites clearly shows that the differences come down to web performance basics and the fundamental construction of a web page. This includes connections, object count and type, page size, and hosts. This can be seen in the following chart:

†3 objects greater than 200KB

*11 objects greater than 200KB

The Fewer Connections the Better
Paramount designed their Super Bowl site using only nine connections, while Universal used 41 connections:

The number of connections was a significant factor in Universal's poor response time because more connections equated to more bytes transferred. The tradeoffs can be significant as Universal's response time shows.

After the IP address is resolved by a DNS lookup, the number of connections generally sets the pace for page loading. Even though modern browsers are capable of making between 6 and 8 simultaneous connections to the same host, it doesn't mean you have to use them all. Creating TCP/IP requests takes time and resources, and the milliseconds of overhead that each one requires can quickly add up to seconds, especially during a big game night when massive web traffic is expected.

Identify Flying Objects
The amount of time spent making HTTP requests for all the objects can have a marked impact on page response time. The following chart shows that Paramount's homepage contained only 41 objects, while Universal's homepage contained 121 objects:

Once a connection is established the objects will, presumably, just fly into your visitors' browser, right? Not always.

What if these objects are large files and the servers are straining because of an increased load (as during a special event like the Super Bowl). In Universal's case, there were 11 files tipping the scale at well over 200KB each (two files where over 750KB each). Paramount, on the other hand, only had three files exceeding 200KB.

Size Matters
You've probably heard this once or twice - page size matters. Page size is characterized by totaling all the files that make up a web page (typically compressed and in KB).

Here we see Universal's homepage size coming in at a whopping 4995KB while Paramount's homepage comes in at only 1625KB:

Typically, file size isn't too much of an issue during normal surfing, but Super Bowl Sunday is not a normal traffic day. You can agree that five pounds is heavier than two pounds, and it subsequently takes more effort to lift five pounds. This same concept is true for web sites - some are heavy in KB and others comparatively lighter.

In this case, Universal's page was not as ‘fast and furious' as Paramount's because its page size was 3370KB heavier. Newtonian Law of the Internet states it's going to take longer to download heavy pages than lighter ones so long as the access lines are equal.

Host Counts Count
Using the HTTP Archive Trends site (http://httparchive.org/trends.php#numDomains&maxDomainReqs), you can find information on many web site design trends. Two such trends that I find interesting are the average number of domains accessed across all websites and the maximum number of requests (Max Reqs) on the most used domain.

Here's a table comparing Paramount to Universal to the average for all websites:

The difference between the two studio sites is very clear. We can see that Paramount designed a site that was well under the average for number of Domains and Max Reqs on one domain with three and 39, respectively, where Universal was well above at 27 and 75, respectively:

Further, examining the average number of Domain/Hosts alone, Universal used 9x more hosts across their homepage over Paramount. A fast response time can be increasingly challenging to design and there will be some compromises made, and a low host count seems to be an obvious tactic to follow.

Back to the Basics
Comparing the Universal and Paramount Super Bowl web site results highlights some of the key truths of web performance. Primarily, fewer connections to fewer hosts requesting fewer, smaller objects produces a smaller page size and these items can have a positive impact on page response time. Placing these areas on high alert before going live - connections, object count and type, page size, and hosts - may be one of the best ways to ensure a successful Super Bowl any day of the year.