Tag Archives: Profiling

mod_pagespeed is not (always) the answer

Posted by Daniel on April 13, 2011 1 comments

What is mod_pagespeed

Google recently released a chunk of code in the form of an Apache module. The idea is that you install it in your Apache server, it sits in between your application and the web browser and modifies the served requests to make the page load faster.
It does this by using combinations of filters, some are well known best practices, others are newer ideas. For example on filter simply minifies your JavaScript while another embeds small images in a page using data-uris. The changes these filters make range from low risk, to high risk. It should be noted that not all the filters will improve the page time some even making pages slower in some cases.

So what’s the issue?

The issue here really isn’t mod_pagespeed, but it’s the way people are viewing it. In my job as a Web Performance Engineer I have had several people recently say to me “let’s put mod_pagespeed on our web server to make it faster”. This is a break from normal attitudes, if someone were to to say “we should put our images into data-uris” then people would question the speed benefit, or the extra load on the server. For some reason when Google implement a page speed module people just assume that it will make their page faster, and that it will work in their environment. The truth is that Google really have no idea what the module will do to your page.

The second issue is that all these tweaks can usually be better implemented at the application level. If you minimize all your JavaScript as part of your build process then the web server will not have to do it for you. The same applies to data-uris. If they are simply part of the page then the browser doesn’t need to read in the extra image, uuencode it, then compress it. All that is quite a lot of work, which only really needs to be done once.

So what should I use mod_pagespeed for then?

You don’t always have access to the application code. If you are using third party software then before mod_pagespeed you may have had no control over the minification of CSS. This is where the module really shines. It gives you a layer between the application code and the web browser where you can apply all sorts of performance tuning.

The other advantage I can see is for looking for the best tunings to apply to your application quickly. You can setup mod_pagespeed and and run experimental tests with the filters on of and with a control to quickly figure out what rules you should apply in your application.

SystemTap

Posted by Daniel on July 25, 2009 None comments

SystemTap is the Linux analogy to Solaris DTrace and is similar to the strace command, only much much more powerful. It effectively lets you set breakpoints in the kernel to monitor what your applications are doing. For example if I was worried that some application I’d written was polling way too often, I could ask SystemTap to output the number of times my application calls poll() or select().

To use SystemTap first you write a simple script, or borrow one from someone else. On a Fedora system you’ll fine some sample scripts in /usr/share/doc/systemtap-0.9.8/examples provided you have SystemTap installed. You then run the stap; command. The stap command immediately begins parsing the scipt looking for any tapsets that your script uses and if it does it includes them. It then converts your script into C code and compiles it into a kernel module. This kernel module is inserted into the running kernel and stap attaches to it. The kernel module stays in the kernel until it is cancelled by the user, it reaches an exit function or it encounters too many errors.

While SystemTap can be used to simply dump loads of data about what an application is doing in kernel space that is not its purpose. SystemTap scripts are able to drill down, extract, process and format the data its gathering. For example if you were trying to find out what files a process was writing to your disks could just output every single write call and print it out, or you could keep the statistics and every ten seconds print the top ten files written to. SystemTap is designed to help you filter out all the noise and monitor only what you want to monitor.

The simple way to get started with SystemTap is to download the Beginners guide or the Tutorial. On Fedora systems when you install SystemTap you’ll find the tutorial at /usr/share/doc/systemtap-0.9.8/tutorial.pdf. SystemTap skills are handy for system administrators and developers, so if you fit into those categories I’d highly recommend you check it out.

Random Thought: Where does /dev/zero come from and where does /dev/null go? What happens if you pipe /dev/zero to /dev/null?