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Today we undertook two maintenance and upgrade tasks at GrabPERF that have been neglected for too long.

1. The Agent code was streamlined and removed the connection error sub-routine. It seems that the latest versions of cURL no longer support the connection error determination (I can only imagine the madness of trying to support this on multiple OSs), so it has been removed as part of the error detection process. This change has been pushed out to four agents for testing and will be distributed to all other active agents after this is complete.
2. Upgrade of cURL to 7.19.4 on four agents. The same four agents that have the new agent code have also had the underlying HTTP(S) engine (cURL) upgrade to 7.19.4. Although this supports no new features that I am aware of, it is always good to be on top of the latest release with bug-fixes.

We are also trying to determine how to capture the URL that we connect to when we take a measurement. As far as cURL is documented, it still does not appear to support this feature.

The Web analytics firm StatCounter has released a set of metrics that mines their entire dataset to provide worldwide metrics on browsers, searches, and operating systems.

This is the kind of data that everyone should be interested in. And it’s free. Check it out at StatCounter GlobalStats.

The GrabPERF Retail Web Performance Index is an extension of the Holiday Performance Index created for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday craze in 2008.

There is a methodology statement explaining more about the index below the data table.

Please add any comments or questions to this post.

On the weekend, I upgraded the database engine for GrabPERF to Mysql 5.1 and switched the main data table from MyISAM to InnoDB.

The switch to InnoDB was done because of the locking issues that were occurring during long queries, especially when doing ad-hoc analysis. The row-level (versus table-level) locking of InnoDB has removed most of these issues.

I have been seeing some strange behavior with the new engine. As a result of this, I will be re-starting the database engine twice a day. There should be no degradation, as this is simply a daemon re-start, not a machine re-start.