RB from ShowSlow blog

RB from ShowSlow blog.

If you had troubles installing 0.10, go ahead and download the latest package:

• showslow_0.10.2.zip (zip, 862K)
• showslow_0.10.2.tgz (tarball, 730K)

Installation instructions can be found in the wiki:
http://www.showslow.org/Installation_and_configuration

Kudos go to Johan Bleuzen for filing a bug about the install problems.
Please use issue tracker if you see some issues or missing functionality (patches are welcome too):
http://code.google.com/p/showslow/issues/list

And, as always, you’re very welcome to write an email with questions or suggestions to our mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

Welcome ShowSlow 0.9 with updated beacon.

New rules displayed include:

• Avoid CSS @import
• Avoid document.write
• Combine images using CSS sprites
• Prefer asynchronous resources

Just follow upgrade instructions if you already have an instance running.

Or you can download code package and install it.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been using WebPageTest a lot lately – having a web-based app always available makes wonders!

Testing one page over and over again is quite common when working on optimization for a particular site so I’ve added WebPageTest form to a details page on ShowSlow long time ago.

This was useful, but not keeping track of your data was unusual for ShowSlow so last week I’ve changed the code a bit and now all WebPageTest requests are kept along with other ShowSlow data for the URL so you can come back to the test and look at it again over time.

If you pick a private test, it will not be tracked. You can change this behavior for your instance, you can set $keepPrivatePageTests = true; in your config.php file.

You can see the set of tests collected for google.com

Get latest code from subversion or download the packages.

Full list of changes can be seen in bug tracker, but here are the most important ones:

1. Resolved a problem with missing mod_rewrite (#43)
   A few people complained that timeplot charts and other JS-based functionality wasn’t working on details page. This was happening because mod_rewrite wasn’t enabled for the site or wasn’t compiled into Apache at all. The fix was actually done in SVN Assets project and it will autodetect mod_rewrite now and will use query string for URL uniqueness if it’s not available.
2. dynaTrace beacon and results on details page (#46)
   dynaTrace team is releasing beaconing functionality in dynaTrace AJAX Edition 2.0 (coming up in August, but Beta is already available) and you can now send results to Show Slow.
   
3. Added Google Friend Connect support for user registration and login
   UserBase (which Show Slow uses for user management) supports Google Friend Connect for a while and I just added it to Show Slow so now users can use Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, OpenID, AIM or Netlog accounts to sign in (and Google will probably support more in the future).
   
4. file:// and chrome:// URLs as well as local network URLs are now ignored (#55)
   I don’t know why, but people were submitting data for non-HTTP protocol URLs (file://, chrome://) and private networks (10.x, 193.168.x and even 127.0.0.x) to public instance (http://www.showslow.com/).

   I believe some of them might be pointless on private instances as well.

   So now Show Slow is configured to ignore those URLs, but you can configure your instance to accept internal IPs if you really need it (although I suggest you use internal DNS for development sites instead).

5. Added pagination to URL listing (#23)
   Ryan Doherty submitted a patch for list pagination for URLs measured tab which was important to increase performance of the tool.
6. Added pagination to URL listing (#60)
   I also worked on grouping of URLs so now you can configure Show Slow to group URLs on your instance for different groups within your company or just for different sites or site sections driven by different tools, for example.

Upgrading is easy – just download new version and follow upgrade instructions.

If you don’t want to wait for a packaged release, feel free to use Subversion – all you need to do is run make and it will upgrade both code and database.

If you prefer to use Subversion but stick with release code, the tag for this release is REL_0_7

As always, please report any problems with installation to the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

And feel free to contribute – there are many ways to do so:
http://www.showslow.org/Main_Page#Contributing

I added some code to handle these problems and now non-HTTP URLs are not going to be accepted and private network addresses will be ignored by default too.

You can still configure your own instance to accept private network URLs by tweaking the settings, but you probably shouldn’t remove localhosts anyway.

Don’t forget to run deleteignored.php to remove measurements for URLs that were not supposed to be tracked.

Please welcome automated YSlow and Page Speed monitoring using Show Slow!

Now all you need to do is to register an account and enter your URL and the rest will be taken care of. Show Slow will fire YSlow and Page Speed at your site and collect statistics on a daily basis so you can just sit back and enjoy the graphs!

You can see the results on Alexa Top 100 tab that I also added to ShowSlow.com showcase performance for most popular sites of the internet.

Due to limited resources, ShowSlow.com allows for only one URL per user account to be monitored, but I’m looking for ways to remove or at least increase this limit.

I hope you’ll enjoy the automation and please forward it to everyone around you!

Front-end performance is always a priority for ShowSlow project and all performance-related bugs have high priority so this was time to use SVN Assets. It means that all static assets will now have unique URLs based on their versions in Subversion. Make sure you look into config.sample.php and set $baseAssetURL variable accordingly (simplest approach is to set it to $showslow_base). Also make sure you have mod_rewrite, mod_expires and mod_deflate enabled in your apache.

We also got some look and feel update and you can see uniform header and footer across all pages. You might notice a registration page, stay tuned for more news there. You probably also noticed that http://www.showslow.com/ got buttons for following on Twitter @showslow and like button from Facebook – don’t wait, please show your pride and help spread the word!

And last, but not least, now you can run WebPageTest.org tests right from details page. This feature was hacked together originally and had to be removed because of compatibility issues, but now it’s a solid integration using WebPageTest’s automation API! You can also configure it to run your own instance.

It’s a lot of changes and I hope you have no troubles upgrading, but if you do, don’t forget that you can always ask question on our mailing list here: http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

ShowSlow v0.5 is using rolling average to smooth the graphs, hope it’s going to be easier on your eyes and will help you get more meaning from the graphs.

Go ahead and download new version:
http://www.showslow.org/Installation_and_configuration#Getting_the_code

or just type “make” if you installed from Subversion.