The Operations Manager

Someone over in the "Web Operations Professionals" LinkedIn group ( http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=141947 ) posed the question "does anyone have an first hand experience of mod_pagespeed", particularly regarding suitability for the production environment, ease of implementation and effectiveness in site acceleration. I haven't seen many case studies around as yet, so I thought I would pose the question to the #webperf groups and hopefully collate the responses into a blog post or something. So - are you using it in Production and what's your experience been like? If you could post your thoughts in the comments section on the blog, or reply on any of the #webperf groups - https://groups.google.com/group/make-the-web-faster?hl=en https://groups.google.com/group/web-performance?hl=en http://www.meetup.com/London-Web-Performance-Group/ http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Web-Performance-Group-1938276 http:...

One of my goals is to create an easy to implement real-time web performance analytics solution that doesn’t rely on fragile, inaccurate javascript tags and I have been playing around with an idea on the weekend. I used the performance measurement and analytics stream generation capabilities of Atomic Lab’s Pion to inspect the HTTP traffic directly off the network and measure the page load performance. I then used some simple Python scripting within Pion to generate a beacon to www.webtuna.com , a UK-based performance analytics provider. I then fired up webpagetest.org and generated some traffic from different nodes around the world and you can see the results graphically in the screen shot below. The end result is a proof of concept that works brilliantly to tell you who is on your website, where they come from, what pages they have visited… and how fast the page appeared to load from the end-user’s perspective. Keep in mind these are page load times, not server response...

I run a demo instance of Atomic Lab’s Pion at home that I use for customer demonstrations and generally playing around. I have been looking recently at the visitor session replay functionality and it’s fascinating to see how many people are out there just randomly scanning for vulnerabilities. If we drill down into the headers we can see that in many cases the requests have spoofed headers, IP addresses etc   GET http://www.eduju.com/ proxyheader.php HTTP/1.1 Host: www.eduju.com User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Accept: */* Accept-Language: zh-cn Connection: Keep-Alive The other common request string appears to be: GET http://58.218.199.147:7182/ judge.php HTTP/1.1 All of these requests use up your server resources, but standard analytics won’t show them up, so network-level analytics like Pion are the way to go!

I was posting a comment onto Facebook today and I had to laugh when the URL image preview displayed this – a sprite – instead of another image or Logo. The sprite in question is the “page furniture” with navigation elements, icons etc It is served from a custom, cookie-free domain, with a far futures expiry date (Cache-Control:max-age=605381123) http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/gno/images/orangeBlue/navPackedSprites-UK-15._V202471918_.png Nice to see that Amazon are following the #webperf best practices, even if it confuses the heck out of Facebook on occasion!

Here is my 2009 presentation from the BCS Configuration Management Group in 2009. Configuration Management – ensuring a consistent server configuration to improve confidentiality, security and availability – is a key part of day-to-day operations but is often a thorn in the Operation Manager’s side. If you want to know why, read the presentation! Configuration Management - The Operations Managers View View more presentations from Stephen Thair .

Since we are talking about presentations here is another one I did for the Load Testing Expo in 2009. It’s a case study of how we did the performance testing for an internet-facing content/community/jobs site. Test Expo 2009 Site Confidence & Seriti Consulting Load Test Case Study View more presentations from Stephen Thair .

I gave my Web Performance 101 presentation at the London Web Performance Meetup on Tuesday and it appeared to go down well! I have uploaded the presentation to Slideshare for future reference and it’s had > 500 views in 24 hours, so it goes to show that web performance is a hot topic! Web performance 101 View more presentations from Stephen Thair .

I had a small problem that has been bugging me re time sync on my home PC’s. The underlying problem was that the time sync on my Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008) server was drifting from the external time source (time.microsoft.com). The root cause was that I hadn’t opened UDP port 123 on my firewall to allow NTP traffic to my server. A quick firewall change and a w32tm /resync and everything was working correctly again. More instructions can be found here - http://www.smallbizserver.net/Articles/tabid/266/Id/71/How-to-fix-time-synchronization-errors.aspx