About four years ago, I published/posted a number of indices related to GrabPERF data. This is a re-launch of that, starting with the GrabPERF Search Performance Index.

The methodology of the Search Performance Index is straightforward: A number of key search providers are selected and HTTP GET requests are sent that directly pull the results page of a query page that is searching for ‘New York’.

This is a simple process and one that is a close approximation of the actual search process that hundreds of millions of people perform every day.

alias                       Response Time  Success  Attempts  Success Rate
--------------------------  -------------  -------  --------  ------------
SEARCH - Google Blogsearch      0.2822545    27242     27244       99.9927
SEARCH - Google                 0.3151932    27228     27247       99.9303
SEARCH - Live (Microsoft)       0.3840097    27245     27246       99.9963
SEARCH - Indeed                 0.4112960    27240     27241       99.9963
SEARCH - Yahoo                  0.4574381    24175     24175      100.0000
SEARCH - Altavista              0.4592764    23922     23922      100.0000
SEARCH - Cuil                   0.6757475    23963     23967       99.9833
SEARCH - AOL                    0.7822945    23913     23913      100.0000
SEARCH - Ask                    0.9025220    24157     24163       99.9752
SEARCH - Technorati             0.9053472    27219     27234       99.9449
SEARCH - Amazon                 1.3251402    27245     27251       99.9780
SEARCH - Baidu                  1.7409345    23777     23799       99.9076
SEARCH - Blogdigger             1.8960633    25106     26354       95.2645
SEARCH - BlogLines              2.0238809    27233     27248       99.9450
SEARCH - IceRocket              2.1233684    24147     24177       99.8759
SEARCH - Blogpulse              2.4144131    27019     27247       99.1632

As can be seen in the data, there is a substantial degree of difference in the response time results, but the big three search providers (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live) were in the top five. As well, all but three of the providers (Blogdigger, IceRocket and Blogpulse) had success rates (availability) of 99.9% or higher.

I don’t expect to see much in the way of change in these results, but I will post them for comparison each week.

Today I would like to announce the availability of the GrabPERF Search Performance Index.

The goal of the index is to provide performance metrics for a group of search providers around the world. The results are based on a direct HTTP GET request being made for the search results page by the GrabPERF Agent.

Currently only live data is available. In the near future, archival results on a week by week basis will be made available.

If there is a search provider that has been missed, please contact the GrabPERF team.

My Google Alerts today picked up a post from a former colleague of mine, commenting on another post from the Yahoo! Interface blog.

I had some problems following the stream in the Performance Matters post, so I thought I would this post to clear up my thoughts.

A technical note up front: Using a waterfall chart that only shows non-persistent connections gives a very skewed view on how a modern Web page page performs. Persistent connections and modern TCP/IP stacks with fast-retransmit algorithms and window-scaling have seend a trend away from network-related performance issues in the recent past.

After the dot-bomb crash, the overabundance of bandwidth (in the form of over-built fiber-optic networks) made backbone and end-to-end connectivity issues for business and most home broadband users almost completely disappear.

The wealth of bandwidth (ok, North America consumers arethe poor cousins compared to their European and Asian counterparts) removed the veil of “it’s the network” which had been the crutch of performance engineers for many years, and exposed the effects of poor design and badly designed infrastructure.

In many cases, poor page design could be overcome. However, issues with core infrastructure and application design were (and are) notoriously difficult to resolve without spending a lot of money and investing a large amount of time and manpower.

So, when these issues were combined with the shrinking budgets and constricted IT staffing in the post-boom era, application performance issues became (and still are) the root-cause of most Web performance issues.

In recent months, as the use of Internet telephony, rich-media streaming, file-sharing, RSS, and SOA products rise nearly exponentially, the bandwidth crunch is starting to re-appear. This is something I first speculated about in October 2005 [here].

In one area, I do agree with the Performance Matters post: the larger the page, the slower download. However, the ongoing debate is one that pits the “more smaller” crown against the “fewer larger” crowd. The “fewer larger” crowd appears to be losing, given the design of most modern Web pages.

The only other comment I can fairly make here is that the majority of the sources cited in the Performance Matters post are 5-6 years old. In that time, I have learned a lot about Web performance, and that the post is more relevant to to the state of the Internet at that time, and not now.

Dear Gmail:

This is unacceptable.

So much for the massively scalable and redundant architecture theory.

I still have my Yahoo! Mail account….

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Google, frustration, Yahoo!

Ya know, this is getting really tiresome…

Is it time to move back to Yahoo! Mail? Does Google care that they have performance problems?

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Google, errors, unreliable, capacity planning, web performance

The Yahoo! BlogSearch started off showing less than remarkable results in terms of performance (I leave the qalitative judgement to other critics). Over the last 11 days, the team at Yahoo! have realized that there may be an issue, and they have been working on it.

On Thursday afternoon (Oct 20, 2005), they obviously implemented a major change that caused performance to improve dramatically.

CLICK IMAGE

This improvement was due to some back-end changes in the search itself. How do I know this? All the improvement came in first-byte (server response time).

HOUR                 AVG_SERVER_RESPONSE
-------------------  -------------------
10/20/2005 00:00:00            1.2159322
10/20/2005 01:00:00            1.2658667
10/20/2005 02:00:00            1.3596000
10/20/2005 03:00:00            1.1870328
10/20/2005 04:00:00            1.1672373
10/20/2005 05:00:00            1.2970500
10/20/2005 06:00:00            1.2220333
10/20/2005 07:00:00            1.3705500
10/20/2005 08:00:00            1.4188667
10/20/2005 09:00:00            1.4439000
10/20/2005 10:00:00            1.5772000
10/20/2005 11:00:00            1.4943559
10/20/2005 12:00:00            1.4794426
10/20/2005 13:00:00            1.4017333
10/20/2005 14:00:00            1.6012500
10/20/2005 15:00:00            1.4380333
10/20/2005 16:00:00            1.1326441
10/20/2005 17:00:00            0.5613000
10/20/2005 18:00:00            0.5656833
10/20/2005 19:00:00            0.5766833
10/20/2005 20:00:00            0.5219831
10/20/2005 21:00:00            0.4722131
10/20/2005 22:00:00            0.5022333
10/20/2005 23:00:00            0.4569138

Would love to hear from the Yahoo team, and learn exactly what they did to bring about such a massive improvement.

Business 2.0 is asking how much you would pay to read the NY Times online. [here]

My response: why? I don’t read newspapers anymore. I would pay nothing to read this online, when I can get news free from Reuters, BBC and Yahoo!, and commentary from blogs.

MSM just does not understand. Their model is broken. It is 300 years old, and it is finally succumbing to it’s own dead weight.

The forests of the world are breathing a sigh of relief.

BusinessWeek, trying to support its brethern through it’s lame attempt to “blog”. [here]

It’s official: DoubleClick is going private. [here and here]

This will be very interesting, especially as DoubleClick starts to feel the heat from AdSense and Yahoo! and any number of other small players.

I wonder if DoubleClick will be releasing an AdSense product, or if they will focus on their current market?

alarm:clock

The Street

Dave Winer notes that Silicon Valley isn’t what it used to be. [here]

Now, with Yahoo getting its mojo back [here and here], and a few other happenings in the Valley, there are some signs of life.

But there is still a lot of vacant real-estate. The office buildings that housed Webvan are still vacant after 3 years, and they have a great view of the Bay and the San Mateo bridge. There is still a vacuum there.

I can’t speak of the lap dogs, as I am a mere prole.

However, I do disagree with the comment Dave W. makes about schools. If he is referring to Colleges and Universities, ok, I agree. But the public school system in the Bay area, and in California in general, is one of the reasons why I was not too upset to move to Massachusetts.

My kids were going into the highly underfunded, if not malnourished and dying, system of non-education in California that resulted from one of the greatest breeders of inequity in the modern world — Proposition 13.

I love this statement from Warren Buffett:

Buffett cited the inequity of property taxes he pays on his homes in Omaha, Neb., and Laguna Beach, Calif., and said the California cap on property taxes imposed by Prop. 13 “makes no sense.”

His $500,000 house in Omaha has a tax bill of $14,401. His $4 million house in Laguna Beach has a tax bill of $2,264. The taxes on his Omaha home increased $1,920 this year, compared with $23 on the Laguna Beach home, he said.

Complain about the other taxes; then remember that your kids are going to schools that are 40^th in the US by funding.

I miss the great garden we had. But my kids are learning more by not being in California Public Schools.

Worst kept secret on the net is now out — Yahoo! has purchased Flickr. [here and here]

Guess I should get either a decent mobile phone or a digital camera…

And I am so &*^*&^*&^ clueless that I didn’t even know that Flickr was

1. Canadian
2. From Vancouver

Well, if I can’t cheer for the Canucks, it’s good to have someone else to cheer for.