Skip Links

Network World

Michael Halligan

Velocity Web Operation and Performance Conference Day 1, Plenary Sessions.

By mhalligan on Mon, 06/23/08 - 12:38pm.
Newsletter Signup
  • 9:30 AM Missed the breakfast and keynote.
  • 9:35 AM Listening to Steve Souders talk about Kite. Very short speech, not so much a keynote a it was a product advertisement for Keynote. Long story short, it's a pretty slick performance metrics system with heavy browser integration.
  • 9:40 AM Scott Ruthfield from WhitePages.com is giving his talk, Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation about Jiffy, a newly announced open-source performance monitoring suite. He's comparing it to Gomez and Keynote. It would be nice if O'Reilly would put a link to the software on their age about this talk. Provides real-time, end to end testing of websites for performance, latency, and external element performance (like advertising).
  • Three key requirements considered when deciding to write Jiffy.
    • Real Data At Scale.
    • Measure Anything
    • ~0 Impact on Page Perf
  • Jiffy functionality:
    • Jiffy Library
    • apache config
    • database schema and rollup scripts
    • ingestor
    • parse logs and store in any db
    • reporting toolset
    • Firebug Plugin
  • 9:53AM Technical difficulties. Strange music video being played, weapon of mass distraction.
  • 9:58AM Artur Bergman, VP of Engineering from Wikia is giving the Keynote. Artur asked for a show of hands to those who know how much it costs to serve a webpage in their organization. Precious few hands went up.
  • 10:02AM Wikia had several engineers spend a week in May focusing on performancing. Using Ganglia they were able to identify problems with caching and reduced their CPU loads by 50% accross the board, which delayed their next CAPEX by 6 weeks.
  • 10:07AM Ad networks suck. If you work for an ad network, shame on you. Round of applause.
  • 10:12AM Now they're playing the "We Didn't Start The Bubble" video. Yay memes!
  • 10:16AM John Fowler from Sun is speaking about Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure. Talking about Sun's 20kit. Clock rates aren't going up, but the number of cores will keep increasing, threads will become ever and ever more important. This is somewhat of an advertisement for Sun's hardware platforms and upcoming Solaris features.
Welcome, visitor. Register Log in
About Datacenter Junkie

Michael Halligan is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in IT architecture and operations. His primary role is chief technical officer of BitPusher, LLC, a managed application hosting firm based out of San Francisco and Seattle. He is currently starting up a new Web application providing intelligent services to the convention industry. He previously held architectural and management positions at start-ups MyPoints, Kontiki and Napster.