In normal web-based applications, it's easier to know where the performance
challenges lie. There are always major web pages that get the focus of our
attention. They might be landing pages, the first place every user goes on
the web site, or for particular areas of the web site, like a home page or a
personalized portal page.
There are also pages that are computationally intensive - the page that
completes a purchase, that submits a multi-page form, or that completes some
major set of steps. These are all pages that naturally end up as focal points
for performance tuning. But Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis, mashups, and
other collaborative applications, behave differently.
Performance issues for Web 2.0 applications don't focus on specific pages,
they focus on particular sets of data. For example, a new entry in the
corporate wiki can generate a massive amount... (more)