Is it Just Me, or is Microsoft.com the SLOWEST site ever?!

I often visit Microsoft’s site for various reasons: get new templates for Word, read some of the forums, download software, etc.  However, as of late, it is getting so painful just to go to some parts of their site.  To be fair, I’m certain that they have a web farm with multiple micro-sites that are inter-related but not necessarily inter-dependent, meaning that some of the “parts” make the “whole” appear very slow.

First off, I don’t have the fastest Internet connection all of the time.  When I’m mobile, I have a EV-DO broadband wireless connection that tops out at 127Mb/sec, but is more like 64Mb/sec.  Loading http://www.microsoft.com takes at least 20 seconds until completion.  Loading the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) is even more painful, taking up to 50 seconds until page download completion.  However, even on a fast 3MB connection, these two micro-sites load intollerably slow.

A rational person would immediately tell me that I must be doing something wrong.  Other applications are stealing bandwidth and causing the abnormally long page load times, which is good analytical thinking.  Therefore, I performed some tests.  First, I shut almost everything down: email, monitoring, and web browsers.  Next, I setup my test scenarios:

Test A is performed using Firefox: cache disabled and the plugin “FasterFox” is used to measure page load time on the MSDN website home page.

Test A: MSDN
Test 1: 35.984s
Test 2: 33.140s
Test 3: 32.812s

Over 30 seconds is quite horrible.

For comparison, Google’s home page is measured:

Test B: Google
Test 1: 2.375s
Test 2: 0.968s
Test 3: 1.172s

I’m not entirely sure that Firefox is not caching something and I want a second opinion, so I use WebWatchBot v5.1.4 Enterprise, which internally uses Internet Explorer v7 to measure both sites independently.

Test A: MSDN
Test 1: 34.456s
Test 2: 31.987s
Test 3: 32.334s

Test B: Google
Test 1: 2.112s
Test 2: 1.456s
Test 3: 1.098s

The tests are definative and show a noticable performance difference between the two sites.  Microsoft’s site is slow!  Yippee….well, not really.  They should fix it.