33.97 North / 84.4 West (Northeast of Atlanta, GA)
I used to go to Parkaire Mall with my mom when I was very young. They still had big red balls on all the power lines along Johnson Ferry near the mall from when Parkaire was an airport.
Performance Questions to Ask Hosting Providers: Web Server Configuration « Lickity Split
Topic: Miscellaneous
4:06 pm EST, Nov 17, 2009
Performance Questions to Ask Hosting Providers: Web Server Configuration
Hosting a web application can be annoying and time consuming. There is the cost of the hardware. There is the time configuring, administering, and patching the operating system, web server, and other software. There is the security risk of exposing a machine onto the Internet. So it’s no surprise that many people and companies use a 3rd party hosting provider to host their web application and manage the infrastructure. Choosing a hosting provider should not be made lightly. You no longer have full control over the machine running your web application. For those interested in creating high performance web applications you must ensure that you don’t give up control over the features that you need to make your web application run as fast as possible.
This is the first in a series articles of performance questions you should ask a hosting provider.
Don't get burned when choosing a hosting provider! I speak from experience.
Hosting Provider: But we don't meter our bandwidth! Why do you want HTTP compression?
Billy: I know that, but compression will make my site load significantly faster
Hosting Provider: Sorry, we don't offer access to those modules.
Billy: What is your name? I want to tell the people in billing who is responsible for me canceling my account with you.
Hijexx wrote: Looks nice, haven't tried it yet but the rainfall diagram reminded me of Billy's Phreaknic talk.
There are several tools that can generate Waterfalls:
IBM Page Detailer has probably been around the longest. Its free, runs locally, and is a little clunky. Also, [PRNT SCRN] + [CTRL] + V is the only way to export images.
Firebug has had a waterfall diagram for a while now, but the timing is not very accurate. The 1.5.x code base (in beta but downloadable now) fixes most of these issues and supports the HAR export format which Httpwatch supports as well.
AOL Page Test is free, runs locally, and is good.
I used WebPageTest.org for my phreaknic diagrams which is simply a number web hosted version of AOL Page Test scattered around the world.
Pingdom and a few other places do waterfalls as well.
I've always enjoyed the second, more ethereal half of Radiohead's Paranoid Android. This whole cover is like that, but I do wish it were slightly faster.
PHP Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWtHEmVjVw8) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 402 Payment Required in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\neosmart.net\YouTube5\youtube-core.php on line 8
Best use of a 402 I have *ever* seen! These guys were proxying YouTube videos inside an HTML5 video container. Payment required indeed!
