Jim Panttaja

Yahoo has a web site on Exceptional Performance and Steve Souder, Chief Performance Yahoo! has recently authored a book (O’Reilly) called High Performance Web Sites.

Yahoo also makes available a tool, YSlow, that helps you to assess how you measure up against the Yahoo guidelines.

The advice is clearly focused on sites like Yahoo - and as a number of blogs have suggested, you need to take the advice with a grain of salt. But it is a good starting list - especially if you look at some of the follow on blog entries (many of which are referenced from the Yahoo site).

Phil Haack’s blog describes his experience using Coral Distribution Network (it slowed down his site).

Jeff Atwood’s blog entry in Coding Horror is called YSlow: Yahoo’s Problems Are Not Your Problems.

Look especially at the follow on discussions on Jeff Atwood’s blog.

I now live in two places - one with a 40 megabit connection, the other is much slower (and I am now in my car - and seeing about 800 kbps). It is worth making sure that your engineers are not always running on the the high speed connection - with the servers next door. Sometimes performance problems are masked by really high speed links, or small development databases. You need to simulate the real world when you are evaluating your system. And it may be worth simulating something even worse than the real world. Several years ago, I was running an application that was developed with a development environment. I was trying it on a dial-up line (remember those), and noticed that the application always repainted the screen twice. It was a serious bug in the tool that no one had ever noticed - because on high speed networks, you couldn’t see the repaint.

Use other people’s advice (with a grain of salt), and do your own ‘real world’ evaluations.

Update:

A couple of my colleagues pointed me at some tools to facilitate load testing:

• JMeter
• Grinder
• Netem

Update:

The comments keep coming in. There is a post today on O’Reilly Radar  pointing to A Great Performance and Operations Blog called High Scalability by Todd Hoff. Lot’s of posts about Amazon, Twitter, Hadoop, etc.

And my friend and former colleague Jeff Dao comments:

Some of the suggestions I know of, and some I don’t – like get servers closer to the users, and order you load scripts matter, respectively. Bottom line is, distance and data size matter.

When thinking about this, I always think of water delivery system – pipe size, water volume and water pressure (bandwidth, data size and latency).

I was recently searching on Google Books (I wrote about Google Books earlier this week), and found that they now have information on the books that Mary and I have written and contributed to. But I was surprised that I couldn’t find a reference to The Microsoft SQL Server Survival Guide. At least I couldn’t looking it up by author name (Panttaja). I did find that there was a book by that title authored by Jim and Mary Panttajja. But that’s my book.

So, Google has meta data that is incorrect. No problem, I contacted Google to help them correct this information (they can actually read the information off the cover image if they would like).

It appears that they are ‘unable’ to correct data that is known by them to be in error. I received the following response from Greg:

Hello,

Thank you for your recent message. I have noted your book issue regarding
“The Microsoft SQL Server Survival Guide.” It appears that this title is
one of many books that we recently added to the Google Book Search index
in a metadata-only view. This means that users will only be searching
title, author, subject and copyright information, and in some cases,
tables of contents and/or a book summary. In effect, this is like seeing a
library card catalog online.

At this time we are unable to edit the information for books in
metadata-only view, as we receive this information from third-party
providers. We apologize for this inconvenience. However, I encourage you
to check back with us periodically, as we continue to develop new features
and functionalities.

Sincerely,
Greg
The Google Book Search Team

As Greg points out, it is like viewing a library card catalog online. The difference is that in this case the information is wrong. And Google is unable, and unwilling to provide correct information. Oh yes, and to be clear, it isn’t their fault because it comes from a third party.

This naively appears to me to be at odds with the Google mission statement: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it univerally accessible and useful.” Apparently inaccurate is ok - and too troublesome to correct.

I would expect Google to be at the forefront of maintaining accurate information. I would expect them to provide mechanisms to correct mistakes. Even though it comes from a third party - it is now their data. I am disappointed that they seem content to offer data that they know to be erroneous.

We had a number of errands to run over the weekend - getting a few things for the office, and a few things for our apartment. Before heading out in the car Mary used Google Maps to set up a multi-stop trip, and then email them to the two of us. Here is the map:

View Larger Map

If you click the map (or the view larger map link), it takes you to Google, and you can see the turn by turn directions.

What is really cool is that when we clicked on the link in the email we sent ourselves on the iPhone, it brings up the Map application. Now you can step through the directions and it shows a map of each ‘turn’, and gives you the instructions for the turn.

We are now spending our week days (and some weekends) in San Francisco. Most days we get our on our bikes and ride from South Beach through Fisherman’s Wharf, through Fort Mason, along the Marina, and toward Fort Point (I am sure we will vary this as we get more comfortable with city riding).

I had been noticing that there are very few animals in the city (duh!). Just dogs and birds. I know there are mice, and no doubt rats, though I haven’t seen them. A couple of days ago, while riding through Fort Mason, I smelled a skunk. On Friday, I saw the skunk cross the paved bikeway/hiking path we ride on. Just after I saw it cross - I saw a woman, off the path. The skunk had gone to see her, and collect its meal. I am sure that this is a regular event - the skunk knew when and where to show up.

View Larger Map
When I am in Healdsburg, I look out my window many mornings to see deer walking along my fence line. Many months of the year, there are lizards scurrying every time I go out the front door. Last fall, we saw eight snakes in the same week. Skunks, possums and squirrels are regular visitor. And in the spring, a flock of wild (but not native) turkeys wonders through our property.

City people must be desperate to view wild life.

I have written on another blog about Google Books (in a post on Google Notebooks). Now Google has announced that you can identify a collection of books in your own library ( Google Books).

You can search against only your own set of books (which I do in my genealogy research), or you can do a more global search. You could also identify a set of books that are of interest to you (I have recorded the books I have co-written, or that I wrote a chapter of in my library). Those books may not be searchable (if their copyright is current - or they haven’t been scanned by Google). Here is a link to my library. I noticed while searching that Google has my name misspelled for one of my books.

You can also write reviews (you can view that as notes to yourself), and identify tags (Google calls them labels).

See my posting (referenced above) on Google Notebooks for examples of putting samples from books in to Google Notebooks. Sometimes you are on a roll searching - finding great stuff. Taking snippets as you find them and inserting them in to your notebooks means you can be sure that you won’t misplace the references.

Bob Zurek posted this annotated list of open source tools. Several that I am familiar with, but a few new ones as well: Open Source Tools For The Enterprise.

His comments on IM and the open source project Spark are interesting. He believes that IM will become more of the norm for communications - and Spark is a tool with very strong security, that should allow Enterprises to adopt IM for communication.

I have seen developers adopt IM as their primary interpersonal interface tool. The adoption in other pieces of the organization runs in to more resistance.

Yesterday felt like the first day of school. It was our first day in an “office” with our new company, RebelVox (www.RebelVox.com). We are still not in a real office, but the four of us are all in the same room (and not sitting at the same bench in South Park with our laptops out, or sitting at different tables at the Crossroads Cafe, interviewing people).

So we arrived with our laptops like other kids arrived with their lunch boxes or backpacks. We each claimed our desk (in this case, which couch or which stool). The good news is we already knew where we belonged for lunch - at the nerds table - and we know who the nerds are.

Yesterday the web site went up (at least a beginning one), the initial logo saw the light of day, we each received our phone number. You can check out the website and logo at www.RebelVox.com.

Today the highspeed network arrived - and perhaps later today, some

Now we have to get down to our lessons and our homework.