Posts Tagged ‘performance measurement

A hallway conversation this morning brought up a very interesting point about the relationship between Web performance measurements and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). When choosing between a Web performance measurement solution and a CDN, which service should come first?
Companies facing dire and obvious Web performance issues will want immediate results, leading them to fall into [...]

It’s a rare Web site these days that hosts all of its own content. From the smallest blog to the largest retailer, Web sites farm out their images, streams, and pages to CDNs, and absorb feeds, ads, and data streams from any number of outside providers.
Effective Web performance demands that a site take responsibility for [...]

Slap up some measurements. Look at some graphs. Make a few calls. Your site is faster. You’re a hero.
Right.
Effective Web performance is something that requires planning, preparation, execution, and the willingness to try more than once to get things right. I have discussed this problem before, but wanted to expand my thoughts into some steps [...]

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
Galileo Galilei
The greatest challenge facing companies today is not finding ways to measure performance. The key issue is one of understanding what should be measured and validating that there is agreement on what the purpose of the measurement is.
Organizations are complex. And with complexity arises [...]

In the Customer Generation and Customer Retention articles of this series, the focus was on Web performance measurements designed to serve an audience outside of your organization. Starting with Business Operations, the focus shifts toward the use of Web performance measurements inside your organization.
Why Business Operations?
When I was initially developing these ideas with my colleague [...]

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 [...]

In the realm of Web performance measurement and monitoring, one of the eternal and ever-present questions remains “What is fast?”. The simple fact is that there is no single answer for this question, as it it isn’t a question with one quantitative answer that encompasses all the varied scenarios that are presented to the Web [...]

In the GigaOm blog today, Allen Leinwand puts up a monstrous wake-up call to all the hip and cool Web 2.0 companies out there: Your apps run across the Internet [here].
I have spent 9 years investigating, diagnosing, and validating the Web performance issues of companies. I can tear the Web performance data of a site [...]

mon.itor.us, a service which also provides free Web performance measurement services, appears to be having a wee problem.

The most recent GrabPERF data on this site is available here. The issue may be corrected by the time you look at the data.
I don’t wish suffering like this on anyone. GrabPERF had it’s own 3-4 day outage [...]

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 [...]


About this blog

Stephen Pierzchala is one of a 10-year veteran of the Web performance field who also writes on topics that interest his non-linear world-view.

Contact

stephen@pierzchala.com

+1 (508) 410-3865