While we attended several events in the past as partners of HP, it's our first time attending this O'Reilly conference.
In our experience, the most affordable way to address performance optimization is to follow a maturity model based on a pragmatic, staged approach.
When designing virtual users to be run during load test activities, there are some points to be taken in account to collect realistic and reliable performance measurements:
Recently Google has announced (on its webmaster blog) that its PageRank algorithm would include "page load time" to rank search results. Here's our take on it.