Want to follow all the Holiday Retail Fun? Check out the GrabPERF Black Friday Dashboard! Follow the Web performance of your favorite retailer all the time!

New and updated for 2008!

This morning, Tiger Direct effectively imploded.

Bad day.

UPDATE: Looks like they found the solution to their problem.

Technorati Tags:
Grabperf, Web performance, Tiger Direct, Cyber Monday

Today’s biggest victim of Black Friday appears to be Sears

Sears measurement data for the last 8 hours can be found here.

UPDATE: It gets worse for Sears.

Technorati Tags:
Grabperf, Sears, Black Friday, Web Performance

I have set up measurements to monitor the main pages of some of the world’s largest mobile phone providers.

• US Providers
• Canadian Providers
• European Providers
• AsiaPac / South Asia Providers

Just something to do on a rainy Sunday.

Tags: GrabPERF, Web performance, GSM, CDMA, Web site, mobile, wireless, US, Asia, Europe

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

This morning, after months of increasing performance issues, and connectivity issues, I have retired the Boston Verizon measurement location. This location hosted 2 measurement agents.

The machines, hosted in my basement, are connected using Verizon FiOS, which has become increasingly flaky over the last couple of months. As well, the machines are 7 year old Pentium IIs, and require a substantial amount of spoon-feeding that I don’t have time for at the moment.

I have re-enabled the Technorati #1 Agent to fill the gap, but this leaves only 4 measurement locations running. I again put out my plea for more volunteers to host GrabPERF measurement locations. I have had one volunteer contact me about this (thanks Henrik!), and this location should be up in about 3 weeks.

If you have a spare linux box and a static IP, have I got a project for you!

PS: The contact page is fixed. It was set to auto-refresh and overwrite your e-mails. Ooooops.

Tags: GrabPERF, Agent, Verizon, Web Performance, measurement, performance measurement

My side project, GrabPERF, is looking for a few good measurement locations.

Right now, there are only five measurement locations, two of which are in my basement, on my personal Internet connection. I am hoping, through this pledge drive, to find a number of additional locations. Areas desperately needed include:

• East Coast, USA
• West Coast, USA
• Midwest, USA
• UK
• Asia-Pac
• Southeast Asia
• Australia / New Zealand

Yeah, I know. I am asking for the world. Can’t hurt to try though.

Basic requirements are a Linux box with a static IP address. Additional requirements are documented here.

You can express your interest in hosting a measurement site by filling in the GrabPERF Contact Form or contacting me directly.

Thank you for your continuing support.

Tags: GrabPERF, measurement locations, Web performance

Every day, the Digg search measurement times explode.

Maybe they need to look at that code again…

Technorati Tags: Digg, Digg.com, GrabPERF, Web+performance

I have been running the GrabPERF Compression and Performance study for less than a week, but I thought that I should share some of the initial results with everyone.

As you can see above, the byte transmission savings gained by some sites is pretty astounding. Google News sends a pages with a median weight of near 31,000 bytes when compressed; but when compression is disabled on the client, this jumps to over 139,000 bytes.

What is interesting is that the performance gains don’t look truly significant. However, they compressed pages are faster, and have the added benefit of costing the site less, as bandwidth costs count by the byte (I know it’s more complicated than that, but for now, let’s assume a fantasy world).

I will continue to monitor that results and will close the measurements after 14 days and write up a final report.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Web+Compression, HTTP+Compression, Performance+tuning, GZIP

Ok, the Blogger blogs all use GZIP compression.

BUT! The Blogger.com homepage does not.

Ummm…attention to detail? Anyone?

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Upgrade, HTTP+Compression, Web+compression, QA, GrabPERF, Web+Performance

One of the performance hits that the GrabPERF system has is the dynamic generation of the main page. The nature of the SQL calls and the underlying PHP makes it scale exponentially past a certain number of measurements.

Last night, Kevin Burton made a grand suggestion: generate a static page on a regular schedule.

Duh!

Today, I wrote the script that does this. The performance of the main page has adjusted accordingly.

Yikes!

UPDATE: Ian Holsman reminded that if I use cURL, I can use the exiting PHP to build the pages without a PERL script.

I. AM. AN. IDIOT.

Now, bedtime.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, PHP, MySQL, Dynamic+pages, Static+pages, HTML