ShowSlow.com now fully on Amazon AWS

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Sergey Chernyshev

Not sure if you noticed, hopefully not, but ShowSlow.com‘s test workers have been running on Amazon AWS for quite a while now.

These workers are running a custom “Phantom of the cloud” image I built to run PhantomJS-based work (hope to release it to public soon). You can see the code for ShowSlow workers on Github. They use Amazon SQS to schedule jobs on a daily basis and execute PhantomJS version of YSlow and Google’s PageSpeed Insights API.

AWS is probably an ideal tool for such kind of work – we use auto-scaling functionality to scale the amount of workers up and down for daily tests (there is always one needed to handle just-added URLs).

And today, after a few days of data cleanup and AWS configuration, ShowSlow.com web site and blog are now also run on Amazon’s EC2 with database hosted on Amazon RDS. I hope this will allow us to scale (up and out) as demand will increase.

Posted in Amazon AWS, ShowSlow | Leave a comment

ShowSlow 1.2.1: Package release after a long time of repo-only changes

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Sergey Chernyshev

After a long delay with releases, I’m glad to say that we have release 1.2.1. It includes many small fixes here and there accumulated over the last couple years and updated version of Startup API package.

Upgrading is easy, just follow upgrade instructions if you already have an instance running:
http://www.showslow.org/Upgrading_existing_instance

Or you can download the package:
http://www.showslow.org/downloads/showslow_1.2.1.tar.bz2

and install it:
http://www.showslow.org/Installation_and_configuration

Let me know if you’ll have troubles upgrading and don’t forget to submit bugs and suggestions to the issue tracker:
https://github.com/sergeychernyshev/showslow/issues

And join the discussion mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment

Velocity 2012

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Sergey Chernyshev

If you still don’t have a Velocity ticket, now is time to get one – as always, it’s going to be great with so many speakers and attendees from WPO and Dev/WebOps community.

And first time this year, O’Reilly is hosting community booths at the Expo – W3C, WPO Foundation, Open Source and WebPerf & DevOps Meetups will be presented there, step by to greet the organizers, open source contributors, standards creators and overall great folks.

Register now while there are still seats available!

And don’t forget to join a local WPO meetup or start your own! ;)

Posted in Web Performance | Leave a comment

Measuring Web Performance Using Google Spreadsheets

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Sergey Chernyshev

I went to Google Apps Hackathon the other week with the intention of adding Google Apps Marketplace support to my Startup API project, but quickly realized that time of the event does not allow for a serious undertaking like that and ended up developing using Google Appscript.

My team of Web Speeders developed an awesome application of Google Documents and Google Page Speed API that shows the power of Web based spreadsheets and API-based performance analysis.

We called the app SpeedSheet – it works as follows:

  1. you collect page URLs from the users using a regular Google Spreadsheet form:
  2. these URLs end up in the spreadsheet powered by Google Docs
  3. this spreadsheet has some code in JavaScript (App Script) that is executed using form submit trigger every time new URL is entered into a form
  4. this code makes a call to Google Page Speed API and retrieves overall score inserting it back into a spreadsheet next to a URL entered
  5. then to make it visually appealing, Google Charts API is used to draw a Google-o-meter for a score

You can see result in a spreadsheet:

Team Web Speeders worked hard, we wrote the whole thing at the hackathon and got 3rd place in “new applications” category – Zombie Survival Guide (if you ask me, author is crazy and not just a comedian).

I’d like to thank people who joined the team and coded away with me:

Thanks to the team for daring!

Posted in Meetup, Web Performance | 3 Comments

Your #awesome local @webperf meetup!

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Sergey Chernyshev

It’s been two and a half years since I started NY Web Performance Meetup and I’m glad to see community grow at amazing speed!

We have 9 meetups all over the world already:

San Francisco & Silicon Valley Web Performance Group logo Boston Web Performance Group logo LAWebSpeed logo London Web Performance Group logo

Webperf User Group - France logo Webperf User Group - Vienna logo Webperf User Group - Atlanga logo Webperf User Group - Autstin logo

(and if you started one, but I don’t know about it, let me know)

We have almost 3200 members together and ran over 100 sessions!

But I think it’s not over and only the beginning so what I want to do is to ask you to write about your experience at the meetup you went to recently and what you want to do as a result, e.g. fix your corporate web site, optimize your blog, learn how the hell browsers / servers / network / JavaScript works and so on!

I’m especially proud of European groups that started recently, but kick ass nontheless!
Our favorite O’Reilly Velocity conference is coming to Berlin next month so we partnered with them and going to raffle off one FREE CONFERENCE PASS for Velocity Berlin.

All you need to get the pass is Tweet about your blog post, or if you didn’t write a blog post, then just tweet how awesome your meetup was and use #awesome @webperf to tag your tweet so we can find it!

The last tweets accepted for raffle will be the ones sent by the end of the day on Friday, October 21st when we will close the “submissions” and raffle the pass, but you should keep raving about you meetup.

And I’ll see you at the meetup!

Posted in Meetup | 6 Comments