ProjectX Technology

In the latest in the speeding up NZ Internet series, I’ve just finished retesting the web performance of top 75 NZ homepages. I’m in the processing of processing all of the results and generating the tables.

I’ve capture more data to include DSL download time, caching stats of the pages and total number of HTTP requests.

One month on here are the key stats:

Averages:

• 305.1K for the Homepage size (Up from 304.9K)
• 50 secs for estimated download time for dialup.
• 6.81 secs for download time on DSL
• 56 HTTP requests / files per page
• 20% of the homepage in size is cached. (Indicating bad caching)
• 76% of HTTP request are rechecked against cache (Indicating bad caching)
• 53.8 Yslow score

Other stats:

• 49% of websites use no web compression
• Only two sites have homepages over 1000K
• Top YSlow site has rating of 85
• Worst YSlow has a rating of 29

I’ll post the complete findings shortly.

New iPhone 3G features

• 3g – Cool
• GPS – Awesome
• App store – Fantastic
• Price – Brilliant
• Available in NZ – Can’t wait

So what’s wrong with this picture ????

5 hours of talk time from 10 hours

A while back I created a picture of ZoomIn as a graph. I wondered if its changed . Here’s the ZoomIn graph now.

We’ve been on mod_rails for nearly a week and I’ve been noticing a couple of strange problems.

First, every once and while I’d hit a page and it would come up blank. Second, looking at google’s sitemaps status page told me that certain pages were getting a connection refused error. Also, I noticed the number of requests per minute from Google had dropped. (We use gl_tail for real-time monitoring of our apache logs.)

Then I started thinking that maybe the application instances are taking too long to spin up? I hit one of our staging services which was not active under mod_rails and I got a blank page . So I started combing the user documentation looking for something to set the minimum number of instances. (A quick google and I found that others have made similar requests.)

So then I discovered you can control when mod_rails chooses to shutdown idle instances using RailPoolIdleTime. We had were using the default of 120 seconds. It recommends you set the Idle time to 2 x average number of seconds a user spends on a page. With a little bit of playing around we set it to 600 seconds and found that to work best.

The results were almost instanteous, it took about 15 minutes before Google started crawling at the normal rate.

Mod_rails has been really easy to use so far. We’ve been happy with the performance (now that we’ve got some of the glitches out of the system) and we’re still hanging out for rubyentreprise.

Xlinks is a collection of interesting links as found by the ProjectX staff.

15 things you can do with YUI
Added on 06/08/2008 at 05:01PM


50 things you can do with Google Charts API
Added on 06/08/2008 at 04:59PM


Hadoop use at Facebook
Added on 06/06/2008 at 09:27PM


How google plans to win the wild west of the mobile web
Added on 06/06/2008 at 06:47PM


37 signals – Why we skip Photoshop
Added on 06/06/2008 at 07:43AM





Added on 06/05/2008 at 09:49PM


Cities and Ambition
Added on 06/05/2008 at 08:43PM


Brits get iTunes movie downloads
Added on 06/05/2008 at 08:40PM


Why Tiered Broadband Is the Enemy of Innovation
Added on 06/05/2008 at 08:33PM


Firefox 3 still a memory hog
Added on 06/05/2008 at 11:16AM


Techcrunch brings us Pitches – start-up HOT or NOT
Added on 06/05/2008 at 11:15AM


Malcolm Gladwell on hiring
Added on 06/05/2008 at 11:13AM


2D driving simulator in Google maps
Added on 06/05/2008 at 11:11AM


Testing IE8 connection parallelism
Added on 06/05/2008 at 11:06AM


Introduction to Mobile Ajax for developers – Whitepaper
Added on 06/05/2008 at 10:54AM


CSS sprites – What are they why are they cool and how to use them
Added on 06/05/2008 at 10:49AM


CSS sprites – How to improve performance
Added on 06/05/2008 at 10:48AM


When to use a jpg and when to use a gif
Added on 06/05/2008 at 10:48AM


Goosh – Unofficial google search shell
Added on 06/03/2008 at 02:16PM


Firefox on track to hit 20 market share in July
Added on 06/03/2008 at 10:43AM