Debug website slowness with my © symbol easter egg
As a web application starts to scale to higher levels, you need to be able to quickly isolate the sources of slowness... even if it's just a clue to get you started on your way to finding the problem area.
For that reason, my favorite “easter egg” happens when you mouse over the copyright symbol in the footer of one of my sites.
As an example, mouse over the "©" symbol in the footer of this page:
https://rockthepost.com/secure/ventures
Without looking below at the comments on this post, can you guess what that number represents? Hint: I borrowed this idea from Facebook when I saw it on their footer three years ago.
Written by Jonathan Block
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4 Responses
Wild guess: load time in milliseconds? I got 487
Sure is! Server side script execution timer in milliseconds.
Really clever and useful for "bench-marking" while in production.
Definitely using it.
Thanks for the tip.
Hmm I'm not really convinced yet. Sure it follows the KISS principle, but it lacks a systematically approach. You can have both, though. I love having a statsd around where I can go back in history and see nice graphs - and you can also defer nagios alarms/warnings/whatever from it. So you get noticed when your site doesn't scale while beeing slashdotted.
