The Operations Manager

Hi, It's Movember, the month formerly known as November, now dedicated to growing moustaches and raising awareness and funds for men's health; specifically prostate and testicular cancer. I'm donating my top lip to the cause for 30 days in an effort to help change the face of men's health. My Mo will spark conversations, and no doubt generate some laughs; all in the name of raising vital awareness and funds for cancer's affecting men. Why am I so passionate about men's health? * 1 in 9 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime * This year 37,000 new cases of the disease will be diagnosed * 1 in 2 men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime * 26% of men are less likely to go the doctor compared to women I'm asking you to support my Movember campaign by making a donation by either: *Donating online at: http://mobro.co/TheOpsMgr *If you want to go old school you can write a cheque payable to 'Movember', reference my na...

I must confess that this one had slipped past me… I wasn’t aware that Alexa was now offering performance rankings as well! Alexa now shows an “average load time” as well as a “comparitive ranking” (i.e. 51% of sites are slower). Interesting data for your next website analysis! It’s worth noting that the quoted “1.404 seconds” is about the same as the “repeat view” measurement webpagetest.org (testing from the UK node shows that www.johnlewis.com takes about 7.2 seconds to load with an empty cache, and 1.6 seconds with a primed cache, median values over 5 runs). Presumably this is an average across all Alexa toolbar users, on all johnlewis.com pages (large and small) with empty and primed caches.

Awesome news from Atomic Lab’s that Pion 4.0 has been released! The new Dashboard functionality looks amazing – real-time web analytics likes page views, visitor sessions etc as well as performance analytics like load time and server reply time – along with the usual Pion goodness like tag-free analytics and customer journey visualisation with the Replay feature. Can’t wait to implement this on some customer sites!

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

Came across this today when someone wanted to know how to create multiple email test accounts without involving their IT department (don’t ask!) or managing multiple free email accounts. Gmail allows you to create aliases for your email address automatically. For example, if your Gmail account is joe.bloggs@gmail.com then joe.bloggs+test.case01@gmail.com will work for your account – anything after the “+” sign can be used to create an alias.  These emails will be delivered to your normal Gmail inbox. So when you are testing you can use +test.case01, +test.case02, +test.case03 and so on as your test email addresses (assuming that your application doesn’t get upset at the use of the “+” in an email address. It shouldn’t, its a valid character in the RFC http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5 ) So lets say you want to filter these test emails and label so they don’t get lost in your Inbox. Easy, just use a Gmail filter and search for a whatever common “stem” you used ...

Just a reminder that the first London Web Performance Meetup will be taking place on Wed 19th January! http://www.meetup.com/London-Web-Performance-Group/calendar/15729259/?from=list&offset=0   The guys from Seatwave have kindly agreed to present a case study on their performance improvement project for www.seatwave.com. Perry & Ged have some great "real world" information on what worked for them from a technical perspective and how they managed the project overall. Please RSVP on meetup.com if you are going to attend! See you there from 6pm.

I was doing a bit of research for an article and I started compiling a list of high-profile website crashes in 2010. Pingdom have published a list here - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/major_internet_incidents_and_outages_of_2010.php as have Alertsite here - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/29/the-biggest-web-outages-o_n_801943.html But I decided to compile my own list from a more UK-centric perspective and came up with my “baker’s dozen” below. # Site Date News Link 1 National Rail Jan-10 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/rail_chaos/ 2 Outnet Apr-10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/blog/2010/apr/16/outnet-sale-website-crash 3 Apple (iPhone 4 Launch) Jun-10 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1286756/Apple-iPhone-4-pre-order-Website-crashes-new-iPhone-goes-sale.html 4 ITV.com (World C...

HI all (and long time no chat for many of you I am sure!), This Movember I've decided to donate my face to raising awareness about prostate cancer.  My donation and commitment is the growth of a moustache for the entire month of Movember, which I know will generate conversation, controversy and laughter. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. One man dies every hour from the disease in the UK. This is a cause that I feel passionately about and I'm asking you to support my efforts by making a donation to The Prostate Cancer Charity. To help, you can either: -    Click this link http://uk.movember.com/donate/your-details/member_id/585776/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account . Or, -    Send cheques and CAF vouchers (made payable to 'The Prostate Cancer Charity Re Movember') directly to The Prostate Cancer Charity, First Floor, Cambridge House, Cambridge Grove, London W6 0LE. Be sure to include the person's name on th...

"Steve Souders who art in Google, hallowed be thy name. Thy books did come, whose rules we run, on our sites as it was at Yahoo. Give us each request our cache-control headers, and forgive us our static cookies, as we compress those who request against us, And lead us not into CSS Expressions, but deliver us from Universal Selectors. For thine is the ySlow, the PageSpeed and the Smush.it (ok… Stoyan and Stubbornella) for ever and ever. Heck yeah!"

I recently had a rash of email come in through my SBS 2008 (Exchange 2007) server purporting to be from eBay, Amazon etc. They were, of course, phishing emails but they were “close enough” to the real thing to get low SCL (Spam Confidence Level) and PCL (phishing confidence level) and hence were not rejected by the anti-spam features in Exchange 2007. They were however marked as “fail” or “softfail” by the SenderID checks (Sender Policy Framework aka SPF defines which hosts are allowed to send mail “on behalf of” a given email domain). Since the spammers weren’t on the allowed list, the email was failed the SenderID check. So, how do we ensure that emails that fail the SenderID check don’t get delivered to the user’s inbox? Well, the more dramatic solution is to just reject or delete any emails that fail the test. You can read how to do that here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125259.aspx   That was a bit drastic at this stage so I found another solution h...

The Grand National is one of the largest events in the UK horse racing calendar, and that means hundreds of million of pounds at stake for the online bookmakers and gambling sites. It also means a major headache for the web operations teams as they deal with the inevitable traffic spikes hammering their sites, at a time when availability and performance direct equate to money won or lost. Site Confidence monitored the home pages of ten of the top ranking online gambling sites on the Grand National Saturday, and some fascinating patterns emerged in the lead up to the race (16:15 BST). Firstly, lets look at the Contenders…   You can immediately see a range of availability and performance, with some of the traditional “bricks and mortar” bookmakers considerably slower than the pureplay dotcom’s like “DotCom #1” and Bet365. Option 1 – Do nothing… and #fail The first option is to “do nothing and hope for the best” approach, as seen in the graph above for William Hill, a traditional “Hig...

Whilst re-compiling and re-deploying your entire .Net website application is the “safe” solution to avoid any nasty version conflicts etc its also slow (and a sledge-hammer to crack a nut). If you are running a live website you often just want a quick patch to fix the issue at hand – often just a single assembly. If you are lucky (like I was) you have a good build manager to do all this for you… but I have found that people are not always aware of the options available – they just use the Visual Studio GUI to re-compile the entire solution every time. If you are using Visual Studio to do the build there is no requirement to re-build the entire solution (.sln) every time - you can just rebuild a project (.proj) within the solution so you get just the single assembly. Note that "Build" will only compile changes anyway, "rebuild" will re-compile everything whether it has changed or not. It's worth moving away from using the GUI (if you haven't already) ...

I put together this quick overview on web “user experience” KPI’s for a client but I thought it was worth re-posting it here for future reference… what they wanted to know what “how long did a given page request take on the website”, with the idea of defining certain KPI’s e.g. login must take less that 5 seconds, or saving your user profile less than 10 secs etc. “I had a look at some of the end-user KPI's that were requested for the web side of things so I thought I would drop you a quick email as I have a fair bit of experience in this area (when I used to run www.totaljobs.com website). There are basically 3 ways of doing this - external site monitoring, page tagging (javascript) and appliance-based. External site monitoring is basically where a 3rd party simulated a user page request every 5 or 10 minutes and records how long it took. Basically they "GET" a web page URL. Companies such as Site Confidence (UK), Gomez or Axzona are leaders in this area. "P...