Tag: performance

http2 explained

http2 explained – This document describes http2 at a technical and protocol level. Background, the protocol, the implementations and the future.

Some highlights:

  • The http2 spec is expected to ship in June 2014 (a month or two away!)
  • http2 is heavily based on Google’s SPDY
  • http2 is binary
  • http2 fixes a lot of issues with HTTP 1.1 (pipelining, head of line blocking, etc)
  • http2 brings new features (server push, block, reset)
  • http2 will keep the URL schemes (http and https)
  • http2 will mostly be implemented for https (via protocol negotiations in TLS)
  • http2 already has a variety of implementations: Firefox and Google Chrome (MSIE coming), cURL, Goolge, Twitter, Facebook.  Apache and Nginx expected.

Scaling the Facebook data warehouse to 300 PB

Scaling the Facebook data warehouse to 300 PB

At Facebook, we have unique storage scalability challenges when it comes to our data warehouse. Our warehouse stores upwards of 300 PB of Hive data, with an incoming daily rate of about 600 TB. In the last year, the warehouse has seen a 3x growth in the amount of data stored. Given this growth trajectory, storage efficiency is and will continue to be a focus for our warehouse infrastructure.

Online HAR viewer

HTTP Archive Viewer – a handy tool for troubleshooting web pages.  Here is how to use it:

  1. Open Google Chrome browser (new tab).
  2. Press F12 to open Developer Tools.
  3. Switch to Network tab.
  4. Load any page in the tab.
  5. Right-click anywhere over network requests to get a menu.
  6. Select ‘Save as HAR with content’.
  7. Choose the location for the HAR file.

Now you can drag-n-drop this file into the HTTP Archive Viewer and study how the page loaded, which requests were made, how much time was spent and how it was spent.  This is particularly useful for the following scenarios:

  1. You are about to make some changes to your site, and you want to compare ‘before’ and ‘after’.
  2. You are troubleshooting a session of a non-technical user, who can’t provide you access to his desktop environment.

The average web page has grown 151% in just three years

The average web page has grown 151% in just three years

  1. The average top 1,000 web page is 1575 KB.
  2. More than half of this page size is due to images.
  3. Flash is on the decrease. Custom fonts are on the increase.