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If there is one fundamental trend everyone can agree on in technology circles, it's the move to mobile. More and more online traffic is originating not from PCs, but from smart mobile devices. You can pick your research study to confirm — recently I read that Tony White of Ars Logica is projecting that by next year 50% of all web traffic will be generated by mobile devices. That may be aggressive, but you get the idea.

Is your business prepared for this major shift in customer behavior? Too many people I talk to make the assumption that their online infrastructure is ready, because they've done their performance and load testing homework. But in most cases that testing has been done for fixed Internet traffic, not mobile. Since mobile traffic has different characteristics than fixed, these companies may be in for an unpleasant surprise. And their customers may be too.

To simplify somewhat, the rising percentage of mobile traffic means your servers will be confronted by larger numbers of slower connections. So the challenge here isn't bandwidth, CPU or RAM, its simultaneous calls.

Let's use the familiar analogy of highway traffic. The typical Apache server software can handle only 512 simultaneous connections, or "lanes" of traffic. Anything beyond that number and the queries wait in queue. These connections are also moving much slower than fixed connections, tying up traffic so to speak.

We're now seeing situations where sites that once were fast for fixed internet connections now feel slower, because of slower mobile connections jamming up the highway lanes. And with retailers like Starbucks and Chipotle making online ordering commonplace, this problem is only going to worsen. Fortunately, this issue can be addressed with performance testing tailored specifically to mobile. You can:

1. Open up more lanes – your servers can be set to accommodate more simultaneous calls. This must be done judiciously however, since opening up too many new lanes will cause performance issues of other kinds, such as RAM exhaustion and too many file handlers.

2. Segment your traffic – based on an analysis of traffic patterns, you can segment mobile and fixed traffic to different servers for optimal performance.

Your customers are becoming mobile — make sure you're ready to provide them with a positive online experience.

By Patrick Lightbody, Director of Product Management at Neustar

Related topics: Mobile, Wireless