In the last 24 hours, thanks to the help of some willing volunteers, GrabPERF has seen the addition of three new measurement locations:

• Dallas, TX (USA)
• Virginia (USA)
• London, UK

All of these location have been graciously provided by the team at e-planning.

Thanks to all of you who volunteer your machines and bandwidth for this project.

As always, we are looking for as more measurement locations. It would be great if we could get some data from the Asia-Pacific region.

In 2004-2005, as a lark, I created my own Web performance measurement system, using PERL, PHP and MySQL. In August 2005, I managed to figure out how to include remote agents.

I dubbed it…GrabPERF. An odd name, but an amalgamation of “Grab” and “Performance” that made sense to my mind at the time. I also never though that it would go beyond my house, a couple of basement servers, and a cable modem.

In the intervening three years, I have managed to:

• scale the system to handle over 250 individual measurements
• involve nine remote measurement locations
• move the system to the Technorati datacenter
• provide key operational measurement data to system visitors

Although the system lives in the Technorati datacenter and is owned by them, I provide the majority of the day-to-day maintenance on a volunteer basis, if only to try and keep my limited coding skills up.

But this post is not about me. It’s about GrabPERF.

Thanks to the help of a number of volunteers, I have measurement locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC, Boston, Portugal, Germany and Argentina.

While this is a good spread, I am still looking to gather volunteers who can host a GrabPERF measurement location. The areas where GrabPERF has the most need are:

• Asia-Pacific
• South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh)
• UK and Continental Europe
• Central Europe, including the ancestral homeland of Polska

It would also be great to get a funky logo for the system, so if you are a graphic designer and want to create a cool GrabPERF logo, let me know.

The current measurement system requires Linux, cURL and a few add-on Perl modules. I am sure that I could work on other operating systems, I just haven’t had the opportunity to experiment.

If you or your organization can help, please contact me using the GrabPERF contact form.

Many thanks to Otis Gospodnetic of Simpy for putting me in contact with Benjamin Reitzammer. Benjamin has graciously set up the GrabPERF measurement script on his server in Zurich.

Now that the Europeans have a growing presence on the GrabPERF Network, we need some locations in the US and Asia-Pacific.

Tags: GrabPERF, Simpy, Benjamin Reitzammer, measurement agent, Web performance, Zurich, Asia-Pacific, USA