The Finnish railway company VR launched their new online shop for tickets, and it didn't go too well. As a part of lazy sunday morning, I did a quick sweep through the process of purchasing ticket using Google Chromes developer tools. I didn't actually finish the process, though.
First thing I noticed was tremendous amount of requests that the initial load generates, as it was more than 50. For comparison, loading the front page of google and executing a search generates around 20 requests. A lot of these requests were different css -files and small images. At least those images would have been easy to combine into css -sprites, and some of those css files could have been combined, too.
Second simple thing missing is compression of responses. Again, simple explanation.
Third low hanging fruit would be usage of CDN for JQuery. There might be one problem, as they are using pretty old version of JQuery (I spotted 1.4.2 in one place and 1.3.2 in another, release date of previous was February 19th, 2010) and it might not be available on public CDNs (I didn't check this, lazy sunday as it is).
The backend seems to be implemented in Java and Apache Struts. It is hard to say anything else about the backend without using a lot more time.
Launching a web service as big as this is always a challenge, and I don't know if implementing these small things would have prevented the problems. It seems that most of the page loading time is spent at the backend, so the improvement on the frontend might not have any impact at all. If the application is partitioned into front- and backend, that is.
By the way, at the moment, the online shop is in maintenance mode.
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