I added a few features to ShowSlow in a past couple weeks, but being also busy with HowDoable, I didn’t have time to write about them so here you go – a short digest:

Limit URLs using PCRE regexes

You can now limit URLs to be accepted by ShowSlow using PCRE regular expressions (thanks for initial patch from Aaron). All you need to do is to use a regex instead of just prefix in $limitURLs array – ShowSlow will automatically detect that it’s not a URL prefix and match against it using preg_match.

DBUpgrade for easy data schema upgrades

I’ve started to use another open source project of mine called DBUpgrade to help you with database schema upgrades going from version to version. Going forward, if you’ll need to upgrade the schema, all you’ll have to do is run php dbupgrade.php or just make (which is going to run svn update too). tables.sql will still contain latest schema so feel free to update manually.
DBUpgrade requires MySQLi module to be configured with your PHP, it is also recommended if you’re using MySQL 4.1.3 and later (and you should be).

HAR beacon

And finally, I worked with Jan “Honza” Odvarko who is one of the lead developer of Firebug and related extensions to add HTTP Archive (HAR) support to ShowSlow and beacon support to NetExport Firebug extension (use v0.7b12+) that allows to save contents of Net Panel and later view it. HAR is also supported by HTTPWatch, a tool that created original xml-based export format HAR was based upon.

By default, beacons are sent to http://www.showslow.com/beacon/har/ but you can reconfigure it to point to your own instance using extensions.firebug.netexport.beaconServerURL Firefox config variable (at about:config).

You can see sample result here. For configuration options, see documentation on showslow.org

That was a lot of stuff – I should be reporting about developments more often.

Go ahead and try it all, let me know how it works and if you have any troubles using these features. If you feel you need more features in ShowSlow, go ahead, submit them to our UserVoice forum and email the mailing list to discuss and gain supporters: http://groups.google.com/group/showslow.

Update: See also post by Honza about this: http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/share-har-logs-online/

Our friend and ex-New Yorker, Joe Devon started Web Performance Meetup group in the sunny Los Angeles.

Can’t wait to see what the group is going to discuss and maybe one day I’ll be able to go and visit them ;)

If you’re in the area, come and sign up!

Last week I gave a talk at joint NYC-
and NY Web Performance Group event at Sun Microsystems offices!

It was very nice to see so many people interested in Google’s new performance initiative, I think many were excited and couldn’t wait to try speeding up their sites.

I posted my presentation to TechPresentations here:
http://www.techpresentations.org/Google_Page_Speed_(at_NY_Web_Performance_Group)

and here’s direct link to the slides:
http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/talks/Web_Performance/Google_Page_Speed.html

I’m trying to improve my presentation skills so please give me some feedback and rate my presentation on SpekerRate:
http://speakerrate.com/talks/1952-web-performance-and-google-page-speed

A few major links from the presentation to get you started on Google Page Speed:

• Google’s “Let’s make the web faster” initiative
• Post in Google’s blog about performance analysis section in Webmaster Tools
• Google Page Speed

If you’re on Twitter and still not following me @sergeyche or the group @nywebperf, feel free to do so.

In early July, Mozilla team released a new project similar to ShowSlow in it’s concept, it’s called Cesium – their goal is to help people monitor what’s going on with their performance.

Ryan Doherty who’s running the project and I agreed to join forces to the degree possible and started to work with YSlow on improving the beacon support there, we also followed up on a bug I filed with Google Page Speed project to implement the beacon and it looks like first version is coming up in v1.2 of Page Speed.

Ryan also created a page on Cesium wiki to document beacons and we’re working together on it to make sure we reflect the state of beacons there.

Meeting last night was a good start!

Thanks to everyone who attended, I hope you enjoyed it.

I think it was important to see that front-end performance is a very important topic among the community, but still there are some topics of traditional back-end performance/load-testing/scalability/reliability that a worth have some events dedicated to; maybe we’ll even have some joint event with some operations meetup for those.

Next time I’ll also try not to forget my camera so I can share photos with you, but feel free to take and post yours. Also, if you’re going to blog about the event, please send links to the mailing list or the message board (even if your post is not favorable ;)).

We already have two events scheduled in June and July, but feel free to send me your suggestions regarding the topics you’d like to discuss or present at the meetup!

Once again, thank you to Nicholas Tang and Interactive One for hosting us and I’ll see you on our next meetup at Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/) on June 16th.

After talking to Steve Souders about local events at Web2.0Expo in San Francisco, I realized that New York is missing Web Performance optimization event. I went ahead and saved 75% using Meetup.com discount code (Web2SF09 – graciously provided by Derek Odegard of Meetup team) and now you’re welcome to join New York Web Performance Workshop meetup.

Our first even is planned for May 12 and I’m looking for location at the moment, talking to a few companies I had preliminary OK from. In the first part of the event, we’re going to talk about current state of tools for web performance analysis and optimization and in the second part we’re going to look at the real-life sites and what can be done to improve their performance.

Yesterday, I talked about Web Performance at New York Web Standards Meetup hosted by theMechanism.

Thanks to all attendees for coming to the presentation, I hope it was informative and worked as a call to action.

If you have any questions or need help with your performance optimization project, feel free to post your comments here or contact me directly if you want, I’ll be happy to help.

HTML Slides with meta-data embedded using RDFa are available here

If you’d like to watch more presentations on performance (already have about 30 of them), you can visit TechPresentations: http://www.techpresentations.org/Performance

Including a couple presentations about YSlow and related tools: http://www.techpresentations.org/YSlow

Once again, thank to all attending, asking interesting questions and volunteering for YSlow treatment ;)

Sergey