Ajax Performance

Studies of mobile Ajax performance

Helsinki CS Masters student Mikko Pervilä has posted his excellent thesis, “Performance of Ajax Applications on Mobile Devices,” for our edification. It’s a fantastically detailed and meticulously cited study, covering everything from the history of Ajax to the performance of current cutting edge mobile devices (including the iPhone and the Nokia N800). He analyzes mobile device performance across Ajax toolkits and large websites, yielding a mixed bag of results. Opera Mobile on the N95 was overall the strongest performer, but I was happy to see my beloved iPhone hold its own.

Also worthy of a read is yet another great Performance Research article by Tenni Theurer on the YUI blog: iPhone Cacheability - Making it Stick. The key takeaways for site designers are that components must be <25kB to be cacheable and the total cache size is only 475-500kB.

Mobile Ajax development is a hot topic, but as these two articles demonstrate, there is still a fair bit of work remaining before mobile devices are as capable as desktop browsers. In the mean time, we need to understand the specific design constraints of our target devices to deliver compelling performance to our users.