This service is so promising...I simply haven't had it work seamlessly for me yet. It keeps throwing 500s for me from all over the world.

I can wait to get on it permanently; I'm not giving up on them yet.

DISQUS load times are murderous. I spent significant time getting my site to load in around 200ms, and @disqus adds 200-300 more. #rage

I wish I could disable DISQUS permanently, but I can't get native comments to behave the way I want them to. It just kills me to take the performance hit from DISQUS that I am.

I guess if most everyone is using external comments on top of poor performance, however, then I'm still way ahead.

Still. Grrr...

Introduction

The Site Speed report measures the page load time (latency) for a sample of pageviews on your website pages. It appears in the Content section of the Analytics reports. With this report, you can see which pages load the fastest and which ones are slower. You can also analyze your overall site speed along other important dimensions in order to learn how your site speed relates to a variety of factors. For example, you can view your site speed across the following categories:

• Content—which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources—which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor—how does latency compare by visitor type or geographic region?
• Technology—does browser, operating system or screen resolution impact latency metrics?

Finally—and most importantly—you can take action to improve page load speed for slower pages and then track latency along these other dimensions to see if your actions resulted in desired improvements.

How to Set Up Site Speed

In order for the Site Speed reports to work, you must make a change to your tracking code. The change is a simple insertion of one additional method:

_trackPageLoadTime();

I've been waiting for this for a *long* time. If Google would just go realtime I'd be able to get down to a single script loading on my page. Having both analytics and chartbeat is the wrong answer.

memcache-top perl command-line memcached stat reporter, top-like output

Real-time updates of your memcached stats.

First of all, yes, HTTP headers form something like a long tail:

In particular, hapax legomena (one-offs) make up over half of the headers found. I expected this. Unfortunately for me, however, a lot of the really interesting stuff is over on that long flat section of the long tail. Which means I spent a lot of time poring over one-offs looking for interesting stuff. Weee.

I love this type of fun. I did something similar a couple of years back with SMTP banners; it was enlightening.

Many people do not know that SSH comes with a bookmarkish feature out-of-the-box. All you need to do is to open up ~/.ssh/config (create it if it doesn’t exist) and add something like this:

host foobar
 hostname aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
 port 2224

(Please note that the second and third lines are indented with a space.)

Now you can SSH into ‘foobar’ by simply typing:

ssh foobar

And voila, you no longer need to remember all arbitrary ports, IPs and hostnames. All you need to remember is your bookmark.

Love it.

ssh-keygen; ssh-copy-id user@host; ssh user@host

Love this one.

My prefered tool for performance testing.

Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier -- ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.

So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) -- in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

I just implemented this. Let me know if you see any speed improvements.

Optimized resolv.conf

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4
nameserver 4.2.2.2
option rotate
option timeout:1

option rotate - load balance the queries across the 3 listed servers
option timeout:1 - sets the lookup timeout to 1 sec (default 5s)

Very slick.