Within hours of Chrome’s release, many companies were reporting operational issues. This might seem strange: Chrome is supposed to be leaner, faster, and better. But some of those improvements meant headaches for people running websites — and for those monitoring them. We sat down with Gomez CTO Imad Mouline to look at his company’s experience with the Chrome rollout.

Following its launch, Chrome rocketed to roughly 1% market share practically overnight, according to some sources, and although its use is tailing off a bit, this was a significant enough change in traffic to cause problems. “Small differences under the hood of the browser can lead to big issues in application delivery,” said Mouline. “For example, Chrome has a different connection profile with up to 6 connections per host” which increases TCP session concurrency. “The use of millisecond timing for the Javascript setinterval function also causes issues.”

Lots of incompatibilities are possible with a new Javascript engine, and without testing, it’s hard to predict its impact on functionality and performance. Google is using their googlebot to test compability but this doesn’t help most SaaS providers and enterprises test their private or paywall applications, nor does it help operations teams dealing with the new client technology.

Gomez monitors web application health for hundreds of Internet properties, and many of those customers were reporting operational issues with Chrome. But this is part of a bigger pattern: The increasing dominance of AJAX and Rich Internet Applications. “The web application is no longer what the web developer puts together; it’s what the client sees,” said Mouline. “The only way to see whats happening is realtime on the customer browser, not in the datacenter.” He points out that many websites use modern technologies that are rendered solely on the web browser:

• Objects from content delivery networks (CDNs)
• Client-side code execution (i.e. javascript, Adobe Flash)
• Third-party content such as widgets

As a result, Gomez is seeing latency due to client-side processing become an increasingly important element of overall site performance. Even if an application’s pages are delivered quickly by your servers, there can still be issues. ”Putting performance [into the web application design process] as early as possible is becoming increasingly important,” said Mouline. “Testing before and after every code change is critical. The question is no longer if the infrastructure is going to break, now it’s whether the experience is going to break.”

Gomez was quick to integrate Chrome testing into its monitoring offerings. With all the challenges these new technologies present, we asked Imad what benefits he sees that are driving their adoption despite the headaches. “There is a big picture that is exciting. We are heading towards no palpable difference between web applications and desktop applications,” he said. “[Google] Gears is a enabling offline use. Time-to-market and cost of development are reduced, while improving application flexibility. But certain things you once could take for granted have now changed.”

One example of these changes is the Chrome Task Manager, which shows which sites are causing problems within the browser. Now that you can see the impact of each website on your system’s resource utilization, “the Chrome task manager will empower users to complain.”

“You can have the most stringent release process in the world but you still have to deal with third parties updating software that will change how your application functions. You need continuous testing across all client platforms. You can no longer be in full control as an application provider. Doing business on the web increasingly requires great adaptability.”

Mouline thinks mobility is one of the next big challenges. “Mobile screens display quicker but their network connections are slower. What happens to performance when the end user is moving? A mix of expensive smartphones and cheap “free” phones, with way more categories of clients, new expectations of end users. WAP sites disappoint the smartphone users, sophisticated apps are inaccessible on the cheap phones.”

The rules of the software game are changing and Google’s Chrome is a harbinger of that new software ecosystem, even if it means a few bumps along the way.