High Scalability recently posted a monster of an article with facts about how latency directly affects the bottom line of businesses on the Web, and best of all, plenty of advice on how websites can go about to reduce latency.

A few quick facts that jumped out immediately:

• Amazon has found that every 100 ms of latency costs them 1% in sales.
• Google has found that an extra 500 ms in search page generation time made traffic drop by 20%.
• Slow sites have higher customer defection rates.

The article focuses mostly on how latency issues apply to websites and web services. It pulls in information from a lot of different sources and covers the following areas:

• Sources of latency
• Downsides of latency
• Managing latency
• Latency reduction tips

There is a lot of interesting information in there, so brew yourself a cup of coffee and start reading.

A big thank you to Todd Hoff for putting together another hugely informative article. You might want to check out the rest of the High Scalability website as well. It’s an entire website focused on “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.”

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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