Relying on third party services...
Published Thu, Apr 19 2007 8:32 PM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Blogging, Annoyances
Sometimes it's just not a good idea.
We've all seen what happens when blogrolling.com runs into bandwidth problems. That's why some of us have moved our blog rolls to where they don't affect page load time.
How about other services though? Currently both Sitemeter and Statcounter are giving me fits. It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't a premium subscriber to their services. I pay for the extra data that Sitemeter gives me. I pay for the extra log space that Statcounter gives me.
And right now both services are acting odd. At the moment I can't get either of them to work right, and they're impeding the performance of my site.
Technorati's having trouble just now too, but it at least loads correctly. It's just slow... So is alta-vista. So is flickr.
Pinging these sites doesn't indicate much of a problem, although Sitemeter and Statcounter both take over twice as long to respond to the ping (no, I'm not talking about an XMLRPC ping, I'm talking about a TCPIP ping).
Maybe the servers are just overloaded?
Or maybe something else is going on. Meanwhile, the site is slow. Sorry about that.
Update: Well that was relatively quick. Everything's back. Maybe it was just a local bandwidth hog? Maybe not. I know my site was responding fairly quickly, but all of the little widgets and stuff were really slow. Now things seem to be back to normal.
Still, it leaves me thinking just how much we rely on these little "extras". It also reminds me what things were like back in the days of 300 baud modems.
When things are going right, I can generally load my site in under two seconds at my normal bandwidth. But then, I never surf with less than a broadband connection anymore, and I've usually got a lot of images and other stuff in the browser's cache, so they don't have to be downloaded all the time.
I just took a look at a "Web Page Speed Report" for my site though, and it wasn't pretty. So I cleared my browser cache of everything and tried loading the page. Even with a broadband connection it took almost 8 seconds to load.
It wasn't too long ago that I didn't have a broadband connection. I had to surf the web at 28.8kbps, and sometimes it was agony loading a site. According to the web page speed report I ran at that speed it would take over two minutes to completely load my home page. That's entirely too long.
Nearly half of the page load time is for images. At 28.8kbps and with a reasonably quality connection it would take almost 52 seconds to download the images on the site alone. I've gone to some trouble to try to keep them small, but they're still larger than I thought.
Even the HTML takes around 18 seconds to download at 28.8kbps. I guess I'm a lot wordier than I thought.
Just out of curiosity, I decided to do a little comparison between my site, and a few other sites I like to read. Here's the results according to http://www.websiteoptimization.com:
I think it's clear from these numbers that blogging is a high-bandwidth activity. Just imagine visiting a site and waiting nearly ten minutes for it to load! Or even two minutes. Would you even bother waiting that long?
And that's even without the execution time for the scripts we all use to present blog rolls, plug in to traffic counters add snap previews, or technorati widgets and so on to our sites. Or for the time it takes for those services to respond.
When these services are suffering, our page loads suffer. I started this post because at broadband speeds it was taking altogether to long to load my own page when Sitemeter and Statcounter were unresponsive. It was taking a lot less time to load my pages than it does at 28.8kbps and I thought it was too slow.
Imagine what people with dialup are going through when they read our blogs. Even without all these extras we rely on, some people just aren't going to bother.
It's really too bad that along with all of the statistics you can get about a visitors experience from the traffic counters that we can't also get information about their connection speed or page load time. We can find out what browser someone is using, what version of the browser, what screen resolution and color density they're using, what OS they're running, and even what version of javascript they're using. We still can't get statistics on their connection speed.
I have friends that only have dialup service. Maybe that's why I don't see very many site visits from them. Maybe it's not the content, but the agonizingly slow experience of loading the pages.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Right Pundits, Pet's Garden Blog, The Virtuous Republic, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, third world county, Maggie's Notebook, basil's blog, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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David responded with:
 | "Maybe the servers are just overloaded?"
And I wonder how many servers are running Me$$y%oft server software with the DNS vulnerability that's come under attack this week (and that Me$$y$oft does NOT plan on patching any time soon)?
I just tested twc and had a (slow, I thought) 34 second load time (caches cleared, fresh load). Of course, that wasn't a "test" at a high traffic time, either, and there may be a number of factors contributing to the phenonenon you note here. |
David responded with:
| BTW, I just performed a reload on another machine after "installing" the easiest, fastest-to-"install" OS on it (Puppy Linux 2.14--what I happened to have on hand-- 2.5 minutes from loading the OS fresh from boot to loading twc... :-)) |
Perri Nelson responded with:
 | Not everyone is capable of doing the work required ro run a Linux OS and to deal with the need to find replacements for the software they use. I'm glad that you are. |
Perri Nelson responded with:
| Actually, there are two phenomena I note here. One is that as bloggers we have a tendency to employ just about every cool widget we can on our blogs, and that we frequently have very bloated pages in terms of shear size. My page, complete with images weighs in at over 340KB!
The other phenomenon is the occasional poor performance we see from third party services we use like Sitemeter, or Technorati, or most notably Blogrolling.com. When you look at the number of blogs that use these services, it seems likely to be a bandwidth and capacity problem.
You could be right about the DNS vulnerability though. That might be a contributing factor in what I saw last night. |
hdw responded with:
 | Every time I change my theme, I spend time tinkering to lower the load time. Some sites are unrealistically slow. I usually try to keep mine under a minute on 56k dialup. I sometimes miss, but I'm usually close. |
David responded with:
| Hmmm, coupla points:
1.) Yeh, I neglected to comment on the third-party add-ons "we" (well, you and I at the very least, and tons of other bloggers as well, it seems :-)) tend to have on our sites. And yes, when TTLB or Technorati or Blogrolling have indigestion, that affects our load times.
2.) Finding replacements for much-used--even essential--software can be a pain on other OSes. Recently, though, most popular Linux distros have come with darned near everything the ordinary user needs (or wants) just ready to go. The first time I burned an ISO file in Ubuntu 6.01 (LTS), I simply CLICKed on the file and the CD burning app popped up and asked if I wanted to burn a disk image, for example. And most come with office auites built in or easily-downloadable. ALL of em come with web browsers and mail clients. Ubuntu did NOT (until recently) come with built-in support for mp3s, but the Easy Ubuntu download took care of that (and loads else) with a simple Google search on the terms, "mp3 Ubuntu". Freespire is even easier. Puppy Linus is "hit-me-with-a-brick and I can still do it" easy.
PC-BSD just works, straight from the (easy-peasy, lemon squeazy) install, with word procvessing, media files (even Flash animation) and loads more ready to go by default.
But yeh, for specialty applications, mainstream OSes still have alternative OSes beat. I have yet to find, for example, ANYTHING for an alternative OS that is even on the same PLANET with Encore music transcription software (from GVox), and it refuses to run with WINE on Linus, so I MUST keep Windoze machines for that. For now. :-) No. Rosegarden music software does NOT favorably compare to Encore. Not even to Finale or Sibelius. *heh* Maybe someday.
But specialty software aside, it's quite likely that most computer users can find their ease of use and functionalityneeds fulfilled in an alternate OS... often running better on "less-capable" hardware (read, "dirt cheap, older" :-)) than the most recent versions of Windows (or even Apple) OS require. |
Perri Nelson responded with:
| How much of that software (word processing, spreadsheets, financial management software and the like) that comes with those distributions is compatible with the data formats for Office 2003 or Office 2007? How many of those distributions come with drivers for television cards or older flatbed scanners that aren't even supported by their manufacturers anymore? How many of them have drivers for photo printers? What sort of image editing software is available? Media editing software? How are the software development tools? I use all of those.
I understand your points about the ease of loading, and that most people's functionality needs can be fulfilled with an alternate O.S. I know that my needs are a bit different than the average users. I'm still not convinced that Linux or Unix are really ideal for the average user, but I will admit that they are getting closer to that state.
Your best point is about the "less-capable" hardware. I find it particularly annoying to have to upgrade my computer hardware every few years.
People need a compelling reason to switch their O.S. There are a lot of risks involved in doing it, such as data loss, hardware or software incompatibility, and the like. That's not to mention the learning curve for new software and differently implemented features. |
David responded with:
| I've been able to open, view and edit Microsoft Office files in Open Office 2.02--even save them back in MS Office formats. YMMV. Some macros, etc. may not fully translate.
Any of the several different open source projects addressing media center computing should address your tv card needs (Haupagge and others are readily dealt with.
Gimp seems to have capabilities similar to Photoshop.
I've not run into any printers recently that I've not been able to put online easily, and only a couple of really old scanners that have been problematic.
Software development tools abound. Pick your language/formats.
I would contend that a naive user that's never had much computer experience could be plopped down in front of an Ubuntu or Freespire box and learn to use it as easily as learning to use a Windows computer. And a Windows user switching to a Mac would probably have more difficulty than switching to an Ubuntu, Freespire, or even the new Debian 4 release that's out (that I've not had really enough experience with to make substantive comment on, really).
I'd go further and say that, compared to the difficult transition from DOS to Windows 3.1 that a good friend of mine went through in the early 90s (IBM's go-to guy for the area I lived in at the time for everything from mainframes to POS), transitioning from Windows use to a contemporary Linux GUI distro would be a piece of cake for most users. Not much different to transitioning from Win2K or Me (*shudder* Muppet Edition) to WinXP.
But I could be wrong, of course. I suspect the major barrier to such a change would simply be inertia. :-) Or, as I pointd out elsewhere, essential apps that simply cannot be replaced. |