In the last few months, I have talked on a couple of occasions on how an outage can affect a brand, be it personal or corporate [here and here].

Yesterday my servers experienced a 11-hour network outage due to a broken upstream BGP route.

It’s sometimes scary to see how worn the cobbler’s shoes are.

Tags: bgp, outage, server, success rate, Web Performance

GrabPERF returned to service at approximately 17:30 GMT (13:30 EDT — 10:30 PDT) September 20 2007. The database server was on all night, but an esoteric choice of primary interfaces (i.e. the least obvious one!) meant that it was taking to empty space.

Have fun and enjoy the data!

Tags: app, data, database, GrabPERF, IM, it, One, pr, server

GrabPERF has been offline all day, and will likely be offline for the remainder of the day as Technorati relocates the servers to their new datacenter.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Tags: data, GrabPERF, IE, server, Technorati

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

Tags: Asia, Asia-Pacific, blog, Europe, GrabPERF, HTTP, IM, IP, it, LAN, measurement, Om, performance, pr, server, Switzerland, Technorati, web, Web Performance, Web+performance

March 10, 2007

• When I defragment a disk, I like to know how much is left. It doesn’t have to be a graphical cue, but a percentage done can’t be hard to add.
• Why doesn’t the right-click work in the message list in Outlook 2003?
• Can you detect when a program is activated by an actual mouse event, versus a coded mouse event? The Security Theatre warnings are annoying.
• Parts of OWA don’t work in IE7, likely due to some arcane security setting.
• When I double-click to open a folder, why does Explorer think about it for a few minutes? Or does it just take a lot of smoke breaks?
• Hey, when you prompt me to determine if I actually want to run a "protected" program, why can’t you take that extra microsecond and remember my choice for a couple of minutes. GNOME asks for credentials when you need to run a program as root, and holds those credentials for a while, making some processes that much more convenient.

March 12, 2007

• Ok, the VPN software I have at work doesn’t work, so it’s ok to use Outlook Web Access (OWA) over IE7. WRONG. Apparently it’s up to the IT department to patch and reboot a running Exchange Server to allow Vista IE7 users to access OWA. Technical people seem placated by this, but I am not. Microsoft, did you think this through. "Oh yeah, everyone loves to reboot their Exchange servers on a daily basis!"

Tags: Vista, annoyances, list, OWA, Exchange, IE7, Juniper, Netscreen Remote

Tags: app, cro, HTTP, IE, IP, it, Microsoft, Om, One, Outlook, pr, run, server, Technorati, users, web

It’s always funny when somewhat tech-savvy folks purposely make their bandwidth bills higher than they need to be.

Here’s TechCrunch’s HTTP header response.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:02:23 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 PHP/5.2.0-8 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8
X-Pingback: http://www.techcrunch.com/xmlrpc.php
Status: 200 OK
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"

Port80 Software’s Compression Checker gives us some idea how much bandwidth Mr. Arrington, et al. could save just by activating this little feature, which comes baked into Apache 2.2.x.

Turn. On. Mod_deflate.

Tags: apache, ARIN, bandwidth, compress, compression, content, deflate, EAD, GrabPERF, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, ISP, it, LAN, Om, performance, PHP, pr, run, server, ssl, techcrunch, Technorati, web, Web Performance

I have set up a test to check the performance of the CoralCDN network against that of the origin server. You can view the comparative results here.

The tests used the base HTML document of this blog as the target.

The results so far indicate that there is a slight performance penalty when using CoralCDN in an ad hoc manner. They do offer continuous CDN services, and these likely provide better overall service under normal conditions.

However, it is likely that in situations where server load or traffic volumes increase substantially, the distributed performance system, even in an ad hoc manner, would save your bacon.

I will watch these tests over the next few days to see if any unique performance patterns appear.

Tags: app, blog, CDN, GrabPERF, GrabPERF.org, HTML, HTTP, IE, it, LAN, normal, Om, origin server, performance, PHP, pr, server, the Origin, The origin server, traffic

Well, the irony of this is painful.

I went with 1&1 as the hosting location for my personal domains, including WebPerformance.org.

One of the things that I preach there is the use of compression.

Guess what? 1&1 doesn’t use Web compression on their servers.

Ugh.

Tags: compress, compression, HTTP, it, LAN, Om, One, performance, personal, pr, server, web, Web compression, WebPerformance.Org

Port80 Software is reporting that in their survey of Fortune 1000 Web sites, IIS 6.0 has overtaken Apache as the Web server platform of choice. [here]

My two-cents: I respect the Port80 Software team greatly and love their maniacal devotion to ensuring that IIS users actually make use of the HTTP compression and caching that can so greatly improve Web performance.

That said, they are tied to Microsoft and the IIS platform. I would be curious to see if, scratching below the surface, they were able to determine what the application platform these companies built their mission critical Web applications on. I am open-minded and willing to hear that IIS is winning in that area as well. In my mind, it’s about Web performance tuning, not what you use to get that performance.

That said, I think a critical Web application survey of these same firms would find that many of these companies rely on JSP servers to run their core business processes.

As well, it would be interesting to se, by Fortune 1000 ranking, what the companies are using what server platform.

And…people still use Netscape Enterprise, SunOne, and Domino as production Web servers? YIKES!

Tags: apache, app, application, business, business process, caching, compress, compression, critical, cro, HTTP, IE, IM, it, js, LAN, Microsoft, Om, One, performance, pr, run, server, users, web, web app, web application, web applications, Web Performance, Web server, Web servers

So, after 6 years of controlling and managing my own Web server, I have handed responsibility over to 1 & 1. I wish I could say that there was a really good reason why I’ve done this, but frankly, it’s because I don’t need a lot of oooommmmph for my personal domains (they run happily on a low-end Pentium II Celeron), and the price was right.

GrabPERF is still happily hosted by the folks at Technorati, while Wordpress.com controls my blog.

In some ways, I am glad that someone else has these headaches now.

Tags: app, blog, control, EAD, GrabPERF, GrabPERF.org, personal, pr, run, server, Technorati, web, Web server, wordpress