A few years ago, I wrote an article ablout how to best set up Web server cache-control messages to take advantage of this free form of content distribution. Until now, it has only existed as a PDF file.

Last night, I sent a copy to Kevin Burton of TailRank in response to some of his recent musings around making TailRank faster by sending explicit caching messages in his server responses. His response to the PDF was “make it an HTML file”.

You can now find the Caching for Performance article at Webperformance.org, in the Caching Library.

Use it. Live it.

Technorati Tags: Web+performance, Caching, Cache-control, Apache, Performance+tuning

Tags: apache, blog, cache-control, caching, content, control, distribution, HTML, HTTP, it, LAN, live, Om, performance, server, Technorati, web, Web server, Web+performance, WebPerformance.Org

A few years ago, I wrote an article on how GZIP compression improved Web performance. Don Marti at the Linux Journal was a great editor, and eventually, the article ended up in the online version of the Magazine.

At the time, I used Ian Holsman’s webperf.org (now renamed ITScales) to capture the data. Now that I have built my own Web performance monitoring network, I thought I would repeat the experiment.

You can see the comparative results at these locations:

• Wikipedia
• Google News
• Technorati
• Juniper Networks — they own the Redline hardware acceleration device
• F5 Networks — they sell the F5 hardware acceleration device

After I have collected a lot more data, I will be re-visiting the article and commenting on the state of compression technology on the Internet.

If you would like to suggest a site to measure, please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: HTTP, Web+Compression, Web+performance, GrabPERF, study, HTTP+compression

Tags: compress, compression, data, Google, GrabPERF, GrabPERF.org, gzip, HTML, HTTP, IM, Internet, IP, it, LAN, leave, Linux, Om, online, performance, PHP, pr, Technorati, web, Web Performance, Web+performance, WebPerformance.Org

Apparent using HTTP compression alongside HTTP/1.1 will cause certain versions of MSIE 6.0 to implode. [here]

I personally think this was because the NSA power shortage was making it too hard for the spooks to snoop on compressed Web traffic. [here]

Via: Port80 Software

PS: No, I won’t turn off compression because Microsoft did something really stupid.

Technorati Tags: Internet+Explorer, Internet+Explorer+6.0, MSIE, Port80+Software, HTTP+Compression, Web+Performance, Microsoft, NSA

Tags: app, ASP, browser, compress, compression, cro, HTTP, IE, IM, Internet, it, LAN, Microsoft, MSIE, Om, performance, personal, pr, Technorati, traffic, web, Web+performance

The new GrabPERF Agent code, with support for plain text or regular expression content matching, is now in production on all active measurement agents.

I added one more feature before I rolled out the new code: when a content match error occurs, the server headers and HTML content for 14 days.

I have not exposed this feature yet, but will be doing so in the next few days.

Again, thanks to the GrabPERF community for your continued support.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Text+match, Content+match, Agent+upgrade

Tags: community, content, EAD, GrabPERF, HTML, HTTP, it, measurement, Om, One, performance, pr, server, Technorati, web, Web+performance

Michael Arrington’s latest Crunch product, CrunchGear, is getting beat up this morning.

Ouch!

In the past, these would not appear as errors, but the new text match feature in GrabPERF is working like a charm. The new code is up on 3 of the 5 measurement agents, and the remaining 2 should be updated by tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, CrunchGear, TechCrunch, Michael+Arrington

Tags: app, ARIN, GrabPERF, HTTP, IE, IM, it, measurement, Om, performance, pr, run, techcrunch, Technorati, update, web, Web+performance

I now have a true live example of how text matching can provide information on issues where a successful page is returned.

In this example, the TEST AGENT returned a Text Match Failed error, while 3 of the agents running the current production code said the page was a success.

How do I know that the TEST AGENT is right? Take a look at the byte count. For the successful pages, the byte count is in the 3,600-3,900 byte range; the page that had the Text Match failure only returned 1076 bytes. And three other measurements around that time reported the same approximate size, but reported successful page downloads.

If this Agent code shows continued success and robust behaviour, then I will push it into production on August 14.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Agent+upgrade, Web+performance, text+match, content+match

Tags: ads, app, ARIN, content, current, GrabPERF, HTTP, IE, IM, information, Issues, it, live, measurement, Om, Pages, performance, pr, run, Technorati, web, Web+performance

Ok folks, this is it. I have finally truly woken up from my slumber and I am starting to add features to the system.

Today’s latest: content | text matching.

This is a critical step in the development, as it allows for quality checking against the returned data. Currently, I can only catch errors under 3 defined circumstances:

1. The server returns an HTTP code >= 400
2. The measurement times out when delivering the data (45 seconds)
3. The connection to the server fails (only some agents and kernels)

Now, the ability to confirm that the data being returned under what would be considered by the server admins as a success criteria, i.e. something with an HTTP/200 OK message got sent back to the client, can trigger an error in a defined text string or regular expression does not appear in the HTML.

This is currently up on a test agent, and if it proves stable, I will roll it out to the production agents later this week. If you would like to be a part of this beta, drop me a line or a comment.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Text+matching, Content+matching, quality+check

Tags: HTML, HTTP, Web+performance

So, In my ongoing effort to be more transparent about the data that I find in GrabPERF, I have produced an Excel spreadsheet of Jan 21 - Feb 18 2006 Aggregated Data.

Top Twenty - Performance