Archive for June, 2008

Update: Summary of Homepage Hall of Shame 1 month on..

Friday, June 13th, 2008

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.

What's wrong with iPhone 3G???

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

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 🙁

ZoomIn website as a graph part ii

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

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

Modrails tip – Increase RailsPoolIdleTime

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

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 digest – 08 / 06 / 2008

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

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

YSlow – Eating our own dog food…

Thursday, June 5th, 2008




We’ve been working on improving our YSlow ranking on ZoomIn Homepage. We scored 83 during the homepage audit 3 weeks ago, now we’ve managed to get it to 86.

To improve our YSlow ranking we been focusing on two things. First, we’ve been minifying our javascript & css. Second we’ve been improving our caching of javascript & css. (Which weren’t caching properly due to versioning problems)

From our optimisations, we’ve managed to shave an additional 9K from our javascript and css. It seems that our optimisation of whitespace etc wasn’t quite upto scratch! We’ve started using the excellent yui compressor to help with the optimisation of the files. We’ve also adopted a more formal asset control of our javascript / css using the rails plugin asset packager. It’s a great plugin to properly manage versions of our javascript etc. Now we can increase the Expiry tags for our CSS and Javascript way out, to maximise the cachability of our pages.

The next stage of our optimisation is to tune the number of images via the introduction of CSS sprites.

Bye Bye mongrel ZoomIn now using mod_rails

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

We switched ZoomIn from Apache + mongrel stack to mod_rails on the weekend. The transitition was a breeze. The configuration for mod_rails is super easy !

We’ve noticed the webserver is chewing through a lot less memory on the server and it scales up as demand grows.

Hanging out for ruby enterprise edition !

Who benefits financially from torrenting???

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

I had an interesting chat with Jason Roks over the weekend, who was here for the Xmedia labs.

He made this comment that stuck with me.

prednisone coupon

The only people who benefit financially from torrenting is the telecom’s companies.

ie. The content provider doesn’t get anything from torrents, only the comms companies get money for usage of bandwidth.

It makes you think…

When you have ‘cost per Gb’ charging system, its hard for companies to make money for offering downloadable content.


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