uploading a picture

My RSS newsreader of choice is NetNewsWire. I had purchased it a few months before Brent Simmons sold his company to NewsGator and as a result of that purchase, I was able to obtain a premium NewsGator Online subscription for 2 years which allowed for synchronization of my desktop Mac with the web-based reader.

The web-based reader NewsGator Online whilst functional was not known for its performance, an area touched upon by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in a recent post which analysed market share of various online readers

Newsgator online, a feature fantastic service long plagued with deal-breaking performance problems, is trailing in third place with a mere %3 of views. The company’s desktop feed readers, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, probably have a much larger percentage of views as they are older, more stable products.

After reading an editorial on ajaxian wrt newsgator perceived slowness, I wrote to a few newsgator employees and investors about some ideas I thought which might improve performance

I had discussed these in my community blog a while back

• Cache-Friendly headers
• Compressed Responses
• Reverse proxy fronting an application server

Brian Kellner (GM consumer) wrote back to me that they were going to launch an ajax version of their online reader which would reduce page refreshes and was optimized for client side caching. Today, I received instructions on how to access the beta site. The email from Brian indicated that it was okay to blog about it (yeah, no NDA unlike the Joost invite I got)

I fired up Fiddler and tried to analyse the network traffic. As someone who lives in a different continent to NewsGator servers in a city with tremendous local connectivity, web traffic analysis via a sniffer is a regular excercise

Some early disappointments

Looking at the traffic sent out by Newsgator Online beta via Fiddler , I see that there is a lot of request/response for content with type image/gif and image/jpeg coming from http://www.newsgator.com without any cache-friendly headers (Expires, Cache-Control)

Some Suggestions for performance improvement

Always send images with a Cache-Friendly header

Move the images to either a separate domain or a new sub-domain. Currently because the images are sent from newsgator.com, there is an unnecessary Cookie: header sent from the browser for all images. It should be easy for newsgator to buy a new domain and use that exclusively for image/static content serving.

An example of a request for http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/reader/img/folderopen.gif generates a request of size 1025 bytes (dominated by the Cookie: header) for a response of 677 bytes which is further divided into an actual payload (image size) of 353 bytes and 324 bytes for the header. Remove the Cookie header and the request becomes only 334 bytes. One could tune the image server a bit and reduce the bytes used by the response header

Also, one would expect all html/javascript to be sent via Content-Encoding: gzip for all responses of those Content-type but there are quite a number of responses of those content type sent without being gzipped.

I can understand some reluctance with gzipping Javascript since there are quirks with IE (though if I remember correctly, IE6 SP2/IE 7 handles this correctly). Even use of jsmin would give around 25-30% reduction in size

On the bright side, page refreshes are reduced a lot in the beta.

Technorati Tags : newsgator performance server

As mentioned in a previous post, I was going to upgrade to WordPress 2.1 after it’s release. Well, I had upgraded to it but didn’t mention it on this blog, today I decided to upgrade to 2.1.1 by creating a diff between 2.1 and 2.1.1. Going to turn on mysql query caching (if that’s possible at Dreamhost). Maybe I should ask Dreamhost support if query caching is enabled

As I mentioned in my last post, I was waiting for the release of WordPress 2.0.7 before upgrading this blog. Upgrade was smooth. I was considering adding support for WordPress widgets but may probably wait till 2.1 is released

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Saw that this blog was still on 2.0.4 and was going to upgrade to 2.0.6 for the security fixes and other bugfixes. However, a quick review of the wp-testers list indicated that 2.0.7 is imminent and so I’ll be holding of till that.

I still have to see if there are any issues with PHP 5.2

I am really looking forward to WordPress 2.1 slated to come towards the end of January. Might even experiment with some theme changes at that time.

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David Pogue of the Missing Manual fame has compiled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) about the Apple iPhone

FAQ is available at David’s blog

As someone who regularly follows the RDF (Reality Distortion Field) emanating from his Steveness, I was looking forward to yesterday’s keynote with particular interest on what would be announced for Leopard (MacOSX 10.5) and iWork (whether a spreadsheet app would show up or not)

Though I was personally disappointed with the keynote (only the AppleTV and iPhone) was announced (I thought the one more thing would a Quad Core iMac

I can see why Steve Jobs decided to keep the entire focus on the iPhone. I don’t know how the impact of having the phone exclusive to Cingular would be and the phone is arriving in Asia only in 2008. The lack of 3G of the phone might also hurt its chances in Asia.

What I think is going to be very intersting is that the phone is stated to run MacOSX, now it’s not clear if this means that standard MacOSX programs will run on it. If it does then its a major thing.

But this does mean that developers will have to seriously ramp up Safari/Webkit testing since this browser/rending engine is getting some serious uptake.

MacOSX + Parallels/Vmware Fusion is the way to go for software development/QA. I had already purchased Parallel’s last December when they were offering the one-year upgrade protection plan. Haven’t decided whether to go for an iMac or a Mac Book Pro. I am inclined for the 20″ iMac with 2GB RAM.

However, this post is being edited with Windows Live Writer beta

Samuel L Jackson who is the lead in this years most talked about cult movie “Snakes on a Plane” would be proud of this woman.

Here’s Samuel L Jackson presenting the best movie award at MTV Movie Awards 2006

In a recent survey of global courtesy, Readers Digest found Bombay — now officially called Mumbai — to be the rudest city on earth.

Funny, reading through various blogs and online news report, one would think that there was an immediate transplant of residents from some other place.

Maybe this sounds selfish, but I hope that none of your loved ones were hurt, and that nobody you know personally was hurt. Obviously everyone was somebody’s loved one, and for them I am sorrowful.

One may be far away from Bombay but you can never take the Bombayite out of you

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Bombay