List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2 • Hacker News Board

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#11

Post by delano » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 4:37 PM UTC

bbuffone wrote: post #7

Response time data is useless without other data: - Where are the monitors located? - Where are the sites located? - How was the site monitored? Did they account for DNS lookup and connection times in this time? 8ms for skysheet.com makes me think no? - Are error times rolled into these times? Errors typically will respond quickly. Having built www.yottaa.com, we worked hard to provide data that users can easily take…

This is an early version of the site so there's still a lot of work to do to explain this stuff on the site itself. To answer your questions:

- All monitoring is from EC2's us-east-1 region.

- I don't track the location of the sites, other than specifying the vendor.

- Data is generated by an open source tool called Stella. I'm not currently tracking DNS lookups but probably will eventually.

- Tests with errors are not included in the response times.

The specific response time is less interesting than looking at how a site performs over time (the number and duration of downtime, errors, etc). There are a lot of rabbit holes in testing so what I'm focusing on now is the simplest possible solution that works.

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#12

Post by delano » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 4:43 PM UTC

klochner wrote: post #10

This is a brilliant way to get the attention of HN users. Niggle: some of those are redirect times. BlameStella gets it right if you click through, but the summary data has some bad numbers. For example - www.justspotted redirects to spotlight.justspotted, which redirects to their posterous blog.

It's actually not monitoring redirects. The response times for justspotted.com are based on: http://www.justspotted.com/radar/

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#13

Post by Alex3917 » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 4:53 PM UTC

If LaunchHear really has one of the fastest response times then that's pretty funny, considering we currently pay about $4 a month for hosting.

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#14

Post by emmett » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

delano wrote: post #11

bbuffone wrote: post #7

Response time data is useless without other data: - Where are the monitors located? - Where are the sites located? - How was the site monitored? Did they account for DNS lookup and connection times in this time? 8ms for skysheet.com makes me think no? - Are error times rolled into these times? Errors typically will respond quickly. Having built www.yottaa.com, we worked hard to provide data that users can easily take…

This is an early version of the site so there's still a lot of work to do to explain this stuff on the site itself. To answer your questions: - All monitoring is from EC2's us-east-1 region. - I don't track the location of the sites, other than specifying the vendor. - Data is generated by an open source tool called Stella. I'm not currently tracking DNS lookups but probably will eventually. - Tests with errors are n…

So basically, anyone hosting their site on EC2 will appear to have a fantastic response time, compared to anyone else. Which makes the test mostly useless for comparison between startups (though it could be interesting/valid data for a single startup over time, which is what pingdom sells)

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#15

Post by delano » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:21 PM UTC

emmett wrote: post #14

delano wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an early version of the site so there's still a lot of work to do to explain this stuff on the site itself. To answer your questions: - All monitoring is from EC2's us-east-1 region. - I don't track the location of the sites, other than specifying the vendor. - Data is generated by an open source tool called Stella. I'm not currently tracking DNS lookups but probably will eventually. - Tests with errors are n…

So basically, anyone hosting their site on EC2 will appear to have a fantastic response time, compared to anyone else. Which makes the test mostly useless for comparison between startups (though it could be interesting/valid data for a single startup over time, which is what pingdom sells)

I'm just one guy so I have to start somewhere :]

Sometime soon though, it will be possible to select the location.

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#16

Post by scrrr » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:21 PM UTC

riffer wrote: post #6

scrrr wrote: post #4

What good is this without including some "how busy is this site?"-metric like requests per second? Or the amount of data served?

Why would users care how many requests there are per second, or how much data is being served?

You're right, but in this case I assumed not the users but the HN-readers were the target audience. And I think many are interested in performance benchmarks. I think it makes a difference wether a site with many requests is quick in comparison to a completely idle site.

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#17

Post by cnu » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:28 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #13

If LaunchHear really has one of the fastest response times then that's pretty funny, considering we currently pay about $4 a month for hosting.

What host do you use?

edit: sorry. Found the answer. Softlayer right?

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#18

Post by delano » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:31 PM UTC

cnu wrote: post #17

Alex3917 wrote: post #13

If LaunchHear really has one of the fastest response times then that's pretty funny, considering we currently pay about $4 a month for hosting.

What host do you use? edit: sorry. Found the answer. Softlayer right?

https://www.blamestella.com/vendor/softlayer

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#19

Post by Alex3917 » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:36 PM UTC

cnu wrote: post #17

Alex3917 wrote: post #13

If LaunchHear really has one of the fastest response times then that's pretty funny, considering we currently pay about $4 a month for hosting.

What host do you use? edit: sorry. Found the answer. Softlayer right?

HostGator, which is presumably powered by Softlayer. It's about $4 a month if you use one of the promo codes that are easily findable via twitter or google. It did once crash while I was onstage trying to demo it, but other than that it's been pretty good.

Re: List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2

#20

Post by krrh » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

scrrr wrote: post #16

riffer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would users care how many requests there are per second, or how much data is being served?

You're right, but in this case I assumed not the users but the HN-readers were the target audience. And I think many are interested in performance benchmarks. I think it makes a difference wether a site with many requests is quick in comparison to a completely idle site.

Response time is public information where reqs/second is private. This does give some transparency to end users, and I could see sites linking up their status pages to this tool. You do get some more metrics in an actual signed up plan.