"velocity09" entries

John Adams on Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site

Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams’ exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter. Good luck today John & team… I know it’s going to be a long day! Update: Apparently Facebook & Livejournal have had similar attacks today. Rich Miller…

John Adams on Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World’s Most Popular Micro-blogging Site

Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams’ exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter. Good luck today John & team… I know it’s going to be a long day! Update: Apparently Facebook & Livejournal have had similar attacks today. Rich Miller…

Four short links: 1 July 2009

Four short links: 1 July 2009

Web Awards, Speed Thrills, Magazines in the Cloud, Augmented Reality

  1. The Onyas — New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from “good on ya”, the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
  2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don’t make your users run away! — wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they’ve lost the user’s full attention and have to get it back. […] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
  3. Printcasting — very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
  4. Pachube Augmented Reality Hack — sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain’t bad. (via bruces on Twitter)

Pachube Augmented Reality Demo

Velocity and the Bottom Line

Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins
and I serving as co-chairs. Back in
November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight “best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line.” Much of my work focuses on the how of improving performance – tips developers use to create even faster web sites. What’s been missing is the why. Why is it important for companies to focus on performance?

Announcing: Spike Night at Velocity

Guest blogger Scott Ruthfield is a Program Committee member of the O’Reilly Velocity: Web Performance & Operations Conference.  Web Operations is not for the casual observer: it’s for a particular kind of adrenaline junkie that’s motivated by graphs and servers spinning out of control.  Jumping in, on-your-feet analysis, and experience-based-experimentation are all part of solving new problems caused by unexpected user and machine behavior,…

Velocity Preview – The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft

The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you’re a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft’s highest traffic pages. He’ll be speaking at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.

Velocity 2009 – Big Ideas (early registration deadline)

(tag cloud created from Velocity session & speaker information using wordle.net) My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: “What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?” While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part…

Velocity Preview – Keeping Twitter Tweeting

If there’s a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it’s one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He’ll be talking about that work at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference, in a session entitled Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World’s Most Popular Micro-blogging Site, and he spent some time with us to talk about what is involved in keeping the site alive.

AT&T Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!

The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact.   What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below: From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why…

It's Really Just a Series of Tubes

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you’re someone that, like me, has a [somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure](http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity), you must watch this talk.