NetSuite's performance monitoring is extraordinary.Built into every page within the application is an on-demand performance management widgit. By clicking on the NetSuite logo in the upper left corner of the application, a user can instantly diagnose the factors contributing to page load speed. A screen shot from a dashboard load is above.
In this case, 11% of the load time was the server, 5% was the network and a whopping 83% was the client. To be fair, when I captured this, I had 23 windows open, some of which had multiple tabs.
So full kudos to NetSuite for their transparency and fair warning to corporate SaaS clients - it's not all bandwidth and server. Your client apps need the muscle to generate these complex interfaces.
Google is releasing more generalized tools for monitoring SAAS performance http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/introducing-measurement-lab.html . All SAAS providers need a commitment to optimize the client as well.
