Skip to main content

So you have your website deployed in PROD ... now what ??

Posting on behalf of Usr.Web.Speed -

My previous job had been to architect and develop websites for various customers. During that time my team and I have architected and developed various web applications mainly for enterprises. (But below info is not restricted to enterprises)

Other than the usual development and testing tasks involved, our focus area was to abide by multiple SLAs. One of the primary SLAs was to provide the users of our websites a very low (usually subsecond) response time (or page load time).

To adhere to this SLA, we did multiple activities, in code, process as well as infrastructure. These include (but not limit to) -

  • Using best practices including (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html)
  • Determining the optimum number of calls to the databases, open connections, etc.
  • Providing the fastest mechanisms to download associated content (such as stylesheets, JS files, etc. over CDN)
  • And debugging the reason for the slowness of the websites, when we find any.

After the development is complete, but before deploying it to PROD (production environment), we deployed code to a sanitized PROD-like environment. And load tests were executed using tools (such as - Visual Studio load test or ApacheBench). 

Once the tests are executed, it was then deployed to PROD.
But the question we always had was "is this enough". What we realized was that we do not have any mechanisms to continue monitoring the speed of the web pages after deployment.

The reasons for continuing monitoring is many including -

  • We executed the load tests making certain assumptions (how users use the application, that all users are the same, and there are no other problems) - but in practice, we know that most of these assumptions are theoretical. 
  • The web pages load up other dependent resources from other servers, (not under your control) - when was the last time you added a FB like button on your page? - and do they have an SLA ?

How Usr.Web.Speed. can help you - 

When you sign-up for Usr.Web.Speed, we provide you a one-liner JavaScript code snippet. This snippet should be added to the HEAD tag of your website.
Once this is done, the script will automatically log the speeds of your pages as and when users open your website. 
Also captured is data on how much time it takes to download and load the dependent 
  • JS files 
  • CSS files
  • Images
  • your AJAX calls
Once captured, Usr.Web.Speed processes these logs and provides your insights to the speed of the performance of your application via a dashboard and graphs. 

And the best part of all this - it is FREE during the beta period. So what are you waiting for ? SIGN UP, now.

And remember - do provide some feedback or new feature requests


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Theming in Whidbey using CSS

Continuing my blog titled Themes in Whidbey . I would like to mention some great points I did find out today about Whidbey featrures. How many times have you got sick of developing Sites which have themes???? I mean every page u create has to have, maybe in ASP, something like <link href="<%=Session["ThemeFile"]%>.css"/> I have been doing since a long time. Do mention if you have a simpler method of defining a variable CSS for your page!!! Whidbey simplifies this further. Now in ASP.NET, all you will have to do is Create Themes directory, if not aldready present, Create a directory for each theme required, maybe Black, Gray,etc. Dump your CSS files into this directory. in Page_PreInit method define the Theme as Page.Theme="<Theme directory Name>". Further can be made into Page.Theme=(string)Session["ThemeType"] and viola, your theme management is take care by ASP.NET When you want to change the theme, the...

My first problem with AJAX

I was using Callback (AJAX) to retrieve a page i had developed . Lets start all over, I was using AJAX to retrieve a part of the contents of a web page. Cool, simple, it downloaded without a pain, then I innerHTMLed it to a span tag. Worked fine, successful, clapped my hands etc.etc. Clicked on the button which had seemed to appear out of nowhere. And then, it all fell apart. The feared exclamatory symbol appeared on the status bar.... And for the newbies, thats an indication of a JavaScript error in IE. Of course, as usual i was all curses at my IE window......Anyway to make a long story short (i AM quite sleepy u know). the scripts which i seemed to be innerHTMLing to the span tag are not executed. And what i mean is anything between the script tags which have been innerHTMLed to that span tag are not executed. Of course i can see a ray of hope in the distance. I mean the distance till tomorrow morning. And just for kicks, check out a hi-fundoo flash file titled EPIC 2004 . And for...