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Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation

Scott Ruthfield (WhitePages.com)
Performance
Location: Salons E-F

Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors:

  • Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions
  • Third-party performance monitoring systems (Gomez, Keynote, etc.) that will hit your site occasionally and report back component-level metrics (for a fee)

Neither of these tools give you real-world information on what’s actually happening with your clients—how long are pages really taking to load, what’s the real cost of client-side execution, and what’s the impact of your loading or dependency chain. This is even more important when you don’t host all of your own assets, such as when you load ads or JavaScript from third parties, for example, and you need to monitor their performance.

Thus we built Jiffy—an end-to-end system for instrumenting your web pages, capturing client-side timings for any event that you determine, and storing and reporting on those timings. You run Jiffy yourself, so you aren’t dependent on the performance characteristics, inflexibility, or costs of third-party hosted services.

We’ve been running Jiffy at WhitePages.com since early May, with 10MM+ page views, 400MM+ requests, and 6MM+ searches/day. We’re releasing an early version of Jiffy as an open source project during Velocity, and hope others will pick it up and help us improve it.

This talk will:
  • Provide more information on the problem and the current solutions, and why we rolled our own Provide a technical overview of Jiffy
  • Show some real-world lessons we’ve had using it in our own production environment
Photo of Scott Ruthfield

Scott Ruthfield

WhitePages.com

Scott Ruthfield is VP of Engineering & Technology at WhitePages.com, the world’s most popular people search engine, with >2 Billion searches/year across sites we own (WhitePages.com, 411.com, WhitePages.ca, etc.) and sites we power (people search for Dex.com, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc.). Since joining WhitePages in 2007, Scott’s led software development and site operations through a site redesign, the introduction of user-added listings, and development of a Web Service API.

Before joining WhitePages, Scott was at Amazon.com, where he led technology and business strategy in areas ranging from customer reviews to employee blogs to e-mail marketing to the (current) Gold Box. Before Amazon, he spent five years at Microsoft, working on various failed projects and cost sinks.

He graduated from Rice University with a BA in Computer Science & Sociology and an MCS in Computer Science. He (rarely) blogs at www.scottru.com and devblog.whitepages.com.

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