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Contrary to a recent study that showed that Facebook is among the most reliable social networks, new study conducted by WatchMouse shows abysmal results for Facebook. 104 sites were monitored by WatchMouse, and Facebook was by far the worst performance-wise: it had slow loading times and frequent errors. Check out the graph (too big to show here) to see how bad it looks.
How does WatchMouse measure performance? Here's the official explanation:
"The WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) quantifies the user perception of speed and availability of a site in a single number. The SPI is computed by adding up the time needed to load the main page, adding a penalty for each failed request. The higher the number, the lower the customer experience of the site. Sites with an SPI of 500 perform well, whereas an index of 1500 or higher is an indication of a seriously negative user experience."
Facebook has an SPI of 6629, and Last.FM (1837), Twitter (1467), StumbleUpon (1338) and Friendster (1153) don't fare too well, either. Some of the best performing sites are Yahoo! 360 (707), Pownce (791) and Flickr (804).
However, WatchMouse's results don't go into detail on what's wrong on each of these sites, which makes the study a bit less useful than it should be. For example, we're aware that Twitter has frequent downtime issues, but we haven't heard of Facebook having much trouble with it, which is also concluded in the aforementioned study. On the other hand, Twitter pages are always (pretty much) the same, while Facebook pages can be incredibly slow or quite fast, depending on how many third party applications are installed on the profile. Thus, while Facebook performance may be horrible on average, it will undeniably be very different for each user.