Jiffy: Real World Performance Measurement

Continuation of my notes from Velocity Conference.

Next up is Scott Ruthfield (WhitePages.com) talking about Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation. WhitePages.com is a people search power. They own 411.com. They have data on 180 million people doing 2 billion searches / year and 500 searches per second during peak. A top-50 comscore site.

Very important performance lessons:
Scott says "Slow is bad." Customers just don't want you to be slow. "We're slow." A detailed analysis on their end revealed that the slowness wasn't their fault.

Reflection:

• YSMV: Your slowness may vary
• YCMWYCM: You can't manage what you can't measure
  

Jiffy:

• means: Small unit of time; tick between system clock interrupts
• is an end-to-end system for measuring and reporting on page load activity

Four goals:

• real data at scale: what are customers seeing?
• measure anything.
• real/near time reporting
• ~0 impact on page performance
• he says "it works"
  

What are the components of Jiffy?:

• jiffy.js - library for instrumenting your pages and reporting measurements
• apache (httpd.conf) config - receive and log measuremens
• database schema and rollup scripts
• ingestor: parse logs and store in any db
• reporting toolset
• firebug plugin.
  

Jiffy: mark and measure

• mark - start timing from this point
• measure - report elapsed time since mark.
• one mark:: many measures
  

misc:

• immediate or batch submits
• default browser event measurements
  

What is available today?:

• code.whitepages.com (project link + slides)
• Open Source. Apache 2.0 license
• Firebug plugin by Bill Scott of Netflix
  

What's planned?:

• more database support
• automated configuration
• auto-timeout tools

Great work, Scott!

Also see:

• Download Jiffy: Real World Performance Measurement slides by Scott Ruthfield (PDF).
• Introducing Jiffy: Performance tools for the rest of us by Scott Ruthfield
• Jiffy on Google Code
• Jiffy Firebug plugin: Fine grained calculation of performance timings by Ajaxian
• Bill Scott (Director UI at Netflix) documents his work on creating Firebug extension/plugin for Jiffy
• Performance Analytic Extensions for Firebug: Jiffy and YSlow