Month: September 2005

At my real job, we monitor and report on the performance of a number of different e-commerce verticals.
[I will now try and stop using marketing-speak.]
In the retail index, the Gap has been down for nearly 3 weeks. Well, they have come part way up, but it is flaky, and they don’t have a search function.
No search function? Oh yeah, let’s go shop somewhere else.
Anyway, Erick Schonfeld at Business 2.0 just linked to a story at adfreak about this little re-design outage.
20 days. And counting.
This is unheard of in the Internet economy. Well, not unheard of, but the only other site I know that had a similar re-design outage was Wal-Mart back in 2000.
The Gap is a savvy online retailer. Why couldn’t this been done in a more intelligent way? What has made this re-design so problematic?

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.
This Week’s Notes

1. ERTW.com Agent location taken offline
2. Addition of Google Blogsearch to the Index
3. Numerous performance improvements to the GrabPERF interface

Week of September 12-18, 2005

TEST                           RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------------  ---------  -------  --------
PubSub - Search             0.2688096    99.82      6532
Google - Search             0.4013164    99.97      6532
Google Blogsearch - Search  0.5818507    98.60      4214
MSN - Search                0.6981630    99.83      6532
Yahoo - Search              0.7159974    99.95      6527
eBay - Search               0.8345692   100.00      6528
BlogLines - Search          1.0204595    99.95      6531
BestBuy.com - Search        1.1687228    99.97      6530
Feedster - Search           1.3112797    99.82      6531
Technorati - Search         1.3240335    99.95      6528
Amazon - Search             1.5195445    99.72      2481
Newsgator - Search          1.5823492    99.72      6529
Blogdigger - Search         1.7142475    99.97      6506
BENCHMARK RESULTS           2.0313721    99.50     76849
IceRocket - Search          4.2792600    98.79      6515
Blogpulse - Search          6.5226776    99.29      6522

These results are based on data gathered from two remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.
The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO
IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

I upgraded b2evolution yesterday to 0.9.1, which the developers claim had substantial performance improvements.
I believe them.

Kudos to the b2evolution team!

Now it’s your turn to suffer with this.

CEMETARY POLKA
Tom Waits
Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon
Independent as a hog on ice
He’s a big-shot down there at the slaughterhouse
Plays accordion for Mister Weiss
Uncle Biltmore and Uncle William
Made a million during World War II
But they’re tightwads and they’re cheapskates
And they’ll never give a dime to you
Auntie Mame has gone insane
She lives in the doorway of an old hotel
And the radio is playing opera
All she ever says is go to Hell
Uncle Violet flew as pilot
And there ain’t no pretty girls in France
Now he runs a tiny little bookie joint
They say he never keeps it in his pants
Uncle Bill will never leave a will
And the tumour is as big as an egg
Has a mistress, she’s Puerto Rican
And I heard she has a wooden leg
Uncle Phil can’t live without his pills
He has emphysema and he’s almost blind
And we must find out where the money is
Get it now before he loses his mind
Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon
Independent as a hog on ice
He’s a big-shot down there at the slaughterhouse
He plays accordion for Mr. Weiss

Buy Rain Dogs. End my suffering.

Ok, the site is now running b2evolution 0.9.1 — took some swearing and a weird hack to get it to work, but we’re back!
If you see any weirdness, let me know.

This morning, I asked the ERTW.com measurement location to turn down, as we have completed testing the remote measurement code.
This will have some effect on results going forward, mostly positive. The ERTW.com location had an unusual DNS configuration which was affecting the overall measurement statistics.
I am still recruiting for measurement locations on the West Coast. Drop me an e-mail or leave a comment if you are interested in hosting a measurement location on your linux server.

I watched part of Fatal Flood last night. It was brutal. And, unfortunately, was echoed far too recently not to be a disturbing insight into the nature of the American mind.
The attitude in this nation towards the disadvantaged and disenfranchised has not changed since 1927. This country is falling away from the city upon a hill, the emblematic vision that fuels the misguided and selfish leadership of the United States.
Katrina exposed the raw, festering wounds in the United States. The stench from the Delta is the rotting of the American Soul.

Greg Gershman from BlogDigger found a bug in the Index charts just now. Seems that the chart legend was out of whack with the lines on the chart.
Easy fix. Turns out I was submitting the test ids in a random order. The graph generation component was fine with this, but when I went to build the legend, MySQL ordered the dynamic legend build result in a proper ascending fashion.
Simple fix: when I convert the test ids to an array, I sort the array before proceeding.
Thanks Greg!