The W3C Navigation Timing API has found its way into most modern browsers. It is also now already party supported in Firefox mobile and fully support on new Windows Mobile Phones. While this is a great step forward it should at the moment still be used with care. We at dynaTrace started  using the Navigation [...]

After announcing support for Firefox 7 in dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium we now also provide support for the latest version of Mozilla’s Browser in dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The latest Beta update of dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.2 therefore gives you full JavaScript, AJAX, Network and Rendering analysis support for the latest versions of Mozialla Firefox and [...]

More and more people are talking about the end of synthetic monitoring. It is associated with high costs and missing insight into real user performance. This is supported by the currently evolving standards of the W3C Performance Working Group which will help to get more accurate data from end users directly in the browser with [...]

Most articles on the topic of NoSQL are around the theme of RDBMS vs. NoSQL. DBA’s are defending RDBMS by stating that NoSQL solutions are all dumb immature data stores without any standards. Many NoSQL proponents react with the argument that RDMBS does not scale and that today everybody needs to deal with huge amounts [...]

We often see request error rates as an indicator for SLA compliance. Reality however shows that this draws a wrong picture. Let’s start with an example. We had a meeting with a customer and were talking about their SLA and what it is based on. Like in many other cases the request error rate was [...]

There is no doubt that performance is important for your business. If you don’t agree you should check out what we and others think about the Performance Impact on Business or remember headlines like these: Target.com web site was down after promoting a new labels: Article on MSN Twitter was down and people complaining about [...]

We like to blog about real life scenarios to demonstrate practical examples on how to manage application performance. In this blog I will tell you how we internally improved page load time for some of our community users by 3.5 seconds by simply following our own web performance guidelines that we promote through our blog, [...]

I was looking at Cassandra, one of the major NoSQL solutions, and I was immediately impressed with its write speed even on my notebook. But I also noticed that it was very volatile in its response time, so I took a deeper look at it. First Cassandra Write Test I did the first write tests [...]

Often performance management is still confused with performance troubleshooting. Others think that performance management in production is simply about system and JVM level monitoring and that they are already doing APM. The first perception assumes that APM is about speeding up some arbitrary method performance and the second assumes that performance management is just about [...]

The public cloud promised fast deployments and near endless scalability at low costs. Whether that promise was too good to be true is yet to be seen. But recent problems at Amazon have shown one thing clearly enough: neither Cloud Applications nor the ways we monitor them are production ready yet. On September 15 at [...]

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A LinkedIn user recently posed the question: “What are the best practices for monitoring, collecting and analyzing traffic data for a large content site?” Ian White, lead engineer at Neustar, jumped into to tell readers why active monitoring is just as important as analytics. Website monitoring ensures your site is functioning properly anytime from anywhere.

Below we’ve outlined a few of his key points that will help you monitor your site so you can sleep well at night knowing your website is always up and running.

Monitor everything. You need to be alerted whenever a critical system process goes offline. This includes web servers, cache, servers, databases, etc. Understand that you may not know everything you should monitor until it breaks for the first time, but that only serves as lessons learned for additional metrics to monitor and make for a more failsafe website over time.

How you monitor matters. Whether the purpose of your website is to log in a user or add an item to a shopping cart, your customers depend on each click of the mouse to be fully functional. These interactions require monitoring that automates real browser interactions—like sending headers, setting cookies or executing JavaScript—and alerts you if something unexpected occurs. This provides a realistic view of the customer experience.

Monitor from multiple locations. To ensure your website is fully functional from every coordinate on the globe, you need to monitor your site from different geographic locations. There is no “magic number” for how many locations you should monitor from, but we recommend at least three. For example, if your company is based in the U.S., we suggest you monitor from two locations in the States and at least one in Europe or Asia.

Implement Real User Monitoring (RUM). In addition to monitoring your website uptime, you should also test the load times for your website visitors. Similar to Google Analytics, RUM involves placing a JavaScript beacon on your site. Every time a user visits your site, the beacon records the load time and you are alerted whenever this time goes above a specified threshold.

Establish tiered alerting. If a tree falls down in a forest, does it make a sound? The same thought process behind this popular riddle goes into a tiered alerting system. If the individual responsible for fixing a downtime issue doesn’t check his or her email at 3:00am regularly, with a simple email alert system he or she will not hear if/when your site goes offline. Services like PagerDuty ensure that alerts run up the chain of command with continual forms of alerts until someone responds via email, text message or phone call.

For more information on Ian’s response or to join in on the discussion, click here.

In my role I am responsible for our Community and our Community Portal. In order for our Community Portal to be accepted by our users I need to ensure that our users find the content they are interested in. In a recent upgrade we added lots of new multi-media content that will make it easier [...]

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

Thanks to Dave Thompson for sharing his experience with using BrowserMob to test the performance of a Flex app. To read the full article, check out it here.

Many times have we been posting the recommendation to speed up your DOM Element lookups by using unique IDs or at least a tag name. So, instead of using $(“.wishlist”) you should use $(“div.wishlist”) which will speed up lookups in older browsers. If you want to lookup a single element then give it a unique [...]

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

It’s almost that time of year again. Holiday shoppers looking to stay at arm’s length from the seasonal mall madness will undoubtedly turn to the Internet to make their gift purchases. In fact, ShopperTrak predicts national retail sales will rise 3% during November and December this year as compared to the same time period last year.

In order to keep up with this expected spike in website traffic, there are a few steps ecommerce companies should take to ready their site. In order to help, we’ve rounded up the top eight load testing and website monitoring tips to help ecommerce sites stay on their “A-game” this holiday season.

1. Start load testing now. Procrastination can be a worrisome habit. Put off today what you can do tomorrow, and you may find your ecommerce site has crashed. According to IBM report, Act, Don’t React: A Proactive Business Continuity Solution Protects your Revenues and Reputation, the average revenue loss per hour of downtime is $1.01 million—a price tag your business cannot afford.

2. Set objectives. Look at industry trends and establish what is “acceptable performance” for your organization. Example Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) before load testing can include:

• 90% of pages should load in 4 seconds or less
• All business transactions should take less than 1 minute to complete
• Category search should take no more than 6 seconds to complete

3. Use real browsers. Thanks to cloud computing, it is now cost effective to load test and monitor a website using real browsers. Real browsers let you create more life-like site traffic, unlike virtual browsers that simply mimic a browser’s http request / response sequence. You’ll come away with a clearer view of your end user’s experience.

4. Test beyond the firewall. The most frequently visited parts of your site are the most important to test: applications supporting your home page, browsing, product selection, checkout and exit. Without external testing, you’re only getting half the picture.

5. Revisit frequency: Consider increasing your monitoring frequency to make sure nothing goes unnoticed. You need to be notified immediately if there is any change in your website’s behavior.

6. Collaborate. Advertising and special promotions will affect traffic to your website. Coordinate with your marketing department to ensure your website can handle traffic upticks caused by marketing campaigns.

7. Document. Establish a holiday preparation process and document all of your load testing and monitoring activities. That way you’ll have all the records you need to perform a post-mortem and improve for next year.

8. Choose the Solution that Works for Best You. When working with load testing providers, you typically have two choices: (a) on-demand services that let you run tests 24/7 or (b) full-service testing, which normally includes a dedicated engineer. If you have the resources and expertise on staff, and require greater flexibility for when you test, on-demand is a good choice (Tip: See if you can get started with a free trial.)  If you could use additional expertise with testing and analysis, including professional recommendations and reporting, then full-service load testing is the way to go.

Visit http://www.browsermob.com for more information about our on-demand load testing solutions or http://www.webmetrics.com for more information on our performance monitoring and full-service load testing solutions.

// The US Open is one of the major world sport events these days. Those tennis enthusiasts that can’t make it to the Centre Court in Flushing Meadows are either watching the games on television or following the scores on the official US Open Web Site. The question is: How long does it take to [...]

Testing mobile web sites on the actual device is still a challenge. While tools like dynaTrace Ajax Edition make it very easy to get detailed performance data from desktop browsers, we do not have the same luxury for mobile. I was wondering whether desktop tooling can be used for analyzing and optimizing mobile sites. My idea was [...]

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

Looking for a way to keep up on website performance best practices, load testing tips and all things related to the success of your websites and applications? Then join us for our new BrowserMob office hours.

We’re pleased to announce that starting October 7, SMEs from our Engineering, Professional Services, Customer Service and Sales teams are at your service for one hour on the first Friday of every month. Feel free to pick their brains and ask anything that’s on your mind. They’re happy to share success stories and lessons learned from their work with other customers.

Find full details on the new monthly tradition below:

What: First Friday Feedback, the official BrowserMob office hours

When: 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. PST, The first Friday of every month, beginning October 7

Where: Via WebEx (details to come once you register below)

Who: A diverse team of experts from various BrowserMob teams

How: Register here.

If you’d like to shoot our SMEs a question or feedback ahead of time so that we can be sure to cover it on Friday, please send us an . We look forward to seeing you there!

We're excited to announce Load Impact 2.0 !

Early spring 2011, we were sitting on a ton of ideas about how to improve Load Impact. We had lots of things on our TODO list for the next few major releases of the service, and were discussing what to focus on first and what our general development road map should look like for the rest of 2011.

We came to the conclusion that incremental updates, that we had been doing so far, was not the best course of action. Some of the changes we wanted to make to the service were dependent on other changes we also wanted to make, and some were hard to achieve on top of the current legacy system. Some parts of old Load Impact we had long been wanting to remake from the ground up, and we realized that this was the time to do it. To break with the old codebase and start a new one, transferring everything we liked from the old code base but not hesitating to throw out anything we did not like.

So we embarked on that long and hard, but also fun, journey. Initially, we aimed to continue updating the old platform regularly, rolling out new features and updates to the live site while developing Load Impact 2.0 in parallel. We soon realized that this was overly ambitious, however, and decided that advanced scripting and the menu-based scripting editor that we released in April would be the last major update to the old Load Impact code base.

Then we spent most of the summer and autumn frantically developing Load Impact 2.0. Since August we have been in crunch mode, working 10-hour days, 6 days a week (which is quite a lot to us lazy and decadent Europeans) and our efforts are starting to pay off now, with the 2.0 platform getting closer and closer to being release ready. At the time of writing we are running a closed beta test, and we expect that to continue for another week or two, then we will take 1-2 weeks to finish off everything, and finally release in the second half of October.

So, what's in it for me?  How will Load Impact 2.0 affect me?

First of all, Load Impact 2.0 is a huge upgrade from the old system. We don't want to spoil the surprise, but it will mean a big step up functionality-wise. We expect our competitors to tear their hair out when they see it, at the very least. Introducing a lot of new features often means that you also introduce complexity, but we think we have made a pretty good job of hiding complex functionality until the user asks for it. Load Impact 2.0 should be as easy to use as (or easier than) the current system.

 

Introducing Load Impact credits

One big change that we want to announce beforehand, however, is the new pricing model we will adopt in 2.0. So far, we have been selling subscriptions to premium users, letting them buy premium access for a certain amount of time (a day, a week or a month) but we have realized there are several drawbacks to this scheme. For example, people cannot try out all the Load Impact features until they buy a premium subscription. How do they know that they will be able to do what they want to do, if they can't try before they buy? Also, we have to have limits in place on how many tests you can run, how much data you can transfer etc during your subscription period, otherwise we could be hard hit if someone bought e.g. premium access for a month and then ran one test after another, continuously throughout the whole month. So we set limits, and when a user runs one test too many they are told they can't run any more tests. Many people miss these limits, and are upset when they suddenly get denied trying to start a test.

To avoid these problems, and to get a simpler premium product, we have decided to scrap the old time-based subscriptions and instead sell Load Impact Credits. The credits are used whenever you run a load test, with a small test costing less than a large test. Just by having a registered account you will automatically receive a small amount of credits for free every month. You can use these credits to run several smaller load tests, or perhaps one medium-sized test. Per month. If your needs are more frequent or you need to run larger tests, you have to buy extra credits.

We think this system is fair and that it will allow all our amateur load testing users to continue running really small-scale load tests for free, with access to all our functionality, while the professional testers will have to pay for their testing as they often need to run more large-scale tests and sometimes more frequently also.

 

What will happen with the old system?  Will I be able to access my old test results?

When Load Impact 2.0 is released, we will transfer all users from the old system to the new. We will then also migrate all old test results, configurations etc. The new system will be backwards compatible with the old so you will not lose any data. In fact, there are some test result metrics that we collect today, but which you are not able to see in the user interface (such as how many transactions returned error codes). These metrics will be available in 2.0, even for your old test results.

As Load Impact 2.0 will contain all the functionality (and more) of the current system, we have no plans on keeping the old system running in parallel with the new. When we release, you will not be able to logon to the old system anymore. The web address will still be the same as always - http://loadimpact.com - but the look-and-feel, and the functionality will be different.

 

What if I have an active subscription at the time you upgrade the site - what happens to my subscription?

Existing subscribers will be given a generous supply of credits, so they will not feel they lost anything by buying a premium account just before the upgrade.

 

When is the exact date of the release?

We have to get back to you on that!  When the exact date is set, we will email all our users about it.

 

If you have any more thoughts or questions, don't hesitate to

Quick example of retrieving stock quotes from Google Finance in Python:

#!/usr/bin/env python import json import pprint import urllib2 def get_stock_quote(ticker_symbol): url = 'http://finance.google.com/finance/info?q=%s' % ticker_symbol lines = urllib2.urlopen(url).read().splitlines() return json.loads(''.join([x for x in lines if x not in ('// [', ']')])) if __name__ == '__main__': quote = get_stock_quote('IBM') print 'ticker: %s' % quote['t'] print 'current price: %s' % quote['l_cur'] print 'last trade: %s' % quote['lt'] print 'full quote:' pprint.pprint(quote)

* note: all values in the returned dict object are Unicode strings.

Output:

ticker: IBM current price: 174.51 last trade: Sep 26, 4:00PM EDT full quote: {u'c': u'+5.17', u'ccol': u'chg', u'cp': u'3.05', u'div': u'0.75', u'e': u'NYSE', u'ec': u'0.00', u'eccol': u'chb', u'ecp': u'0.00', u'el': u'174.51', u'el_cur': u'174.51', u'elt': u'Sep 26, 6:07PM EDT', u'id': u'18241', u'l': u'174.51', u'l_cur': u'174.51', u'lt': u'Sep 26, 4:00PM EDT', u'ltt': u'4:00PM EDT', u's': u'2', u't': u'IBM', u'yld': u'1.72'}