Since I started using the Performancing Firefox extension, it seems that Technorati takes a while to find me. FInally figured out that I haven’t enabled pings.
So this is a test post to see if the ping function works correctly.
Technorati Tags: Performancing, Firefox, Technorati
Over the last year, GrabPERF has been something that has caught the fancy of a few in the Blogging/Social Media world. It has given some perspective of how performance can affect business and image in the connected world.
But what of GrabPERF itself? It has been on a development hiatus for the last few months due to pressures from my “real” job and various trips (business and pleasure) that I have been undertaking. Over the last two weeks, I have been trying to clear out the extra measurements and focus the features and attention on the community that appears most interested in the data.
During this process, I heard back from some folks who had been using GrabPERF in stealth mode (even I can’t track all the hits!), and who asked, “Hey! Where did my data go?”. Glad to hear from all of you.
Just to give everyone some idea of the growth, here is a snapshot of aggregated daily performance and number of measurements.
The number of measurements shot up, until I started culling the unused measurements. Over the last 3 weeks, average performance became extremely variable, and that’s when I began considering the culling. As well, the New York PubSub Agent appears to have gone permanently offline, as a part of their winding down process.
The fact that the system was taking 390,000 measurements per day still astounds me.
This was also comparable to the number of distinct sites we were measuring.
After the latest cull, we are down to 84 distinct tests, a level last seen on November 27, 2005.
I am pleased that the system has held together as well as it has.
For history fiends, enthusiasts of lost treasures, and lovers of a good mystery, the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest has been one of those stories that must be followed.
The texts contained in the Palimpsest were lost to humanity for hundreds of years as a result of a common Medieval European tradition — the re-use of parchment. To quote the site:
“The word Palimpsest comes from the Greek Palimpsestos, meaning “scraped again”. Medieval manuscripts were made of parchment, especially prepared and scraped animal skin. Unlike paper, parchment is sufficiently durable that you can take a knife to it, and scrape off the text, and over write it with a new text. In this case, [the text of Archimedes’] five books were taken apart, the text was scraped off the leaves, which were then stacked in a pile, ready for reuse.”
Using a new x-ray scanning technology, the original Greek text is exposed to the Western world for the first time since 1229.
This holds more than a passing interest to me, as one of the most influential history courses I took during my undergrad tenure was taught by a paleographer and historian at the University of Victoria, Michèle Mulchahey (she is now part of the faculty at the University of Toronto). I still often wish I had continued my Medieval European history studies, but my lack of latin prevented me from go much further than I did.
Glad to see a truly old classic resurrected.
For those who capture the minutiae of their lives in a Moleskine or Rite in the Rain, I present the example to which we should all bow.
The Domesday Book is online.
To quote the site
“Domesday is our most famous and earliest surviving public record. It is a highly detailed survey and valuation of all the land held by the King and his chief tenants, along with all the resources that went with the land in late 11th century England. The survey was a massive enterprise, and the record of that survey, Domesday Book, was a remarkable achievement. There is nothing like it in England until the censuses of the 19th century.”
It is a truly amazing work, and a goldmine for researchers and social historians around the world.
Got an e-mail from Kevin Burton of TailRank this weekend saying that he had found some issue with the system’s infrastructure and that he should be back to normal performance.
Looking at this graph, I agree with him.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web performance, TailRank
I was trying yesterday to debug an issue that was appeared to be affecting the PubSub Agent — yes, I re-started it at the request of their sysadmin.
The issue was that it was showing data that appeared to have no relationship with the data appearing from all of the other measurement locations. I tried blocking it off using IPTables, MySQL restrictions, etc.
This afternoon, I figured out the problem.
Yesterday, I had been using this query to diagnose the problem:
select
*
from
data
where
agent_id = 11
and date between subdate(now(),interval 30 minute) and now()
order by
date DESC
And everytime I looked, there was new data. I couldn’t seem to stop the agent from delivering data. Then I had a flash.
select
count(*)
from
data
where
agent_id = 11
and date > now()
157,000 rows of data. From the future.
Thankfully I know the guy who is responsible for keeping the PubSub servers running, and he is going to adjust the time, etc. But he makes no promises about how long the agent machine will stay running.
I apologize for the bad data.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, PubSub, Web Performance, The Future
I took the big leap today and upgraded the base Web server to Apache 2.2.3. This required some finagling with httpd.conf file, and a re-build of PHP, but once that was done, the app bounced up happy as a clam.
As usual, let me know if you see anything unusual — with the server, not with the author.
Technorati Tags: Apache, Apache 2.2.3, PHP
This morning’s bounty of posts brought in two that will make you think.
First was Port80 Software’s comments on using the Cache-Control mechanism embedded in all browsers. This is interesting to read, as I have been trying to get companies to use this mechanism more intelligently for a number of years. I know that the Port80 team gets it, but it is always nice to have some outside validation of a position you have tried to evangelize for a long time.
The second was Tim O’Reilly’s post on Cal Henderson’s new book on Web scalability. While I am likely to purchase the book for a professional interest, I have one problem with Flickr’s current configuration: static.flickr.com does not use HTTP persistence, something I noted last week. This strikes me as weird.
It’s always good to see Web performance rear its head.
Technorati Tags: Tim O’reilly, Cal Henderson, Cache-Control, http, port80 software, persistent connections, Flickr
In the next 10 minutes, I will be turning off the TailRank Measurements. The performance has been abysmal for the last month.
Technorati Tags: TailRank, GrabPERF, Web performance
In the last three days I have gone from WordPress 2.0.2 to 2.0.3, then from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4. All went seamlessly, and the blog working as expected.
Upgrades in both cases took less than 5 minutes.
I love WordPress. I now know why Moveable Type is tanking so hard.