System Administration

Up to Par

Keynote Systems offers an easy way to understand how the various elements on your page affect your site's performance. The numbers returned are, however, only one point of view in analyzing how things are doing. Gomez Networks can provide another perspective. Both measure from various locations around the Net.

Keynote's results graph breaks down the transaction: DNS lookup, TCP session establishment, and HTTP request. If you look at this sample [legend], you'll see that the time for the first byte download is a significant percentage. This could be any number of things. With HealthScout, it was a NIC set to the wrong speed.

You'll also notice that Userland could improve their performance with some minor optimizations.

While looking at my results from Keynote, I noticed that the Blog HOT or NOT image wasn't loading. It moved. This was fortuitous. I found Matt's Beer Blog while trying to find the new location. I'm unsure which is more important: performance, or beer.

9:59:44 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Fans stood in line for hours...

Kasia, who works for Tickets.com, posted some graphs of latency from the rush to buy World Series tickets.

9:49:22 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration