Leaving Corporate

We’re doing a bit of load testing on an upcoming feature for Socialbrowse and I thought I’d write about two tools I’ve found to be incredibly helpful and easy to use.

HTTP_LOAD

The first is http_load.  With http_load you can send many requests at a time to load test your server in just a single process from your own machine.  It lets you know what percent of the requests were returned successfully and how fast they were returned on average.   Its of course open source and you can get it here.

Its very easy to install.  Untar the download, cd into the directory and simply run:

make
sudo make install

You first need to create a file (I call it urls) with a return separated list of the urls you want to load test.  Then run http_load with the appropriate flags.  Here are my abbreviated flag notes:

parallel - number of pages to keep open at a time
rate - number of pages to open per second
checksum - verify that the result is correct
fetches - quit after this many fetches
jitter - vary the rate by about 10%
seconds - quit after so many seconds

To see the full directions on using http_load you can view its man page with

cat http_load.1

I use the following command to keep 10 connections open, connecting at a maximum speed of 5 connections per second for 50 seconds.

http_load -parallel 10 -rate 5 -jitter -verbose -seconds 50 urls

Its especially helpful to run http_load from a productions server (on a different internet connection) and while its runing browse your site from your personal machine to get a feel for how slow things will be under your stressed conditions.
 

JCrawler

JCrawler is great in that it doesn’t just hit a list of pages, but crawls your site.  Especially if your site supports caching, single or few page load testing may not be what you want.  In that case JCrawler would be more effective as it would traverse many more pages on your site.  Download it here.

Here are my install notes:

1. Untar and cd into the folder.
2. cd dist
3. Edit conf/crawlerconfig.xml to customize under your own settings
   (this file has inline comments so you should not have a problem
   to figure-out how things work).
4. chmod +x run.sh
5. ./run.sh

They have already pointed out several missing links and needed optimizations for us.  Hope it helps you too!

Socialbrowse all started with us wanted to help you waste less time online. Really!

Our initial project during Y Combinator was 8aweek, a browser extension that helps you limit how much time you waste browsing the web each day. 8aweek generated a large and passionate following and just before demo day, we added a new feature: the sidebar.

We recognized that there are multiple ways of saving time online. At first we focused on providing ways to limit the time you spend on casual browsing, but it’s also important to save time by making the good content quicker to find. We quickly hacked together a sidebar prototype which had several really cool features, including a slider which incrementally removed old links from the page you are on, leaving only the freshest content.

Expanding on this concept, we realized that the ability to quickly access links of interest could be a great way to save time, and thus we implemented a method of highlighting links that your friends also went to. The response to these features from the users we demo’d them to was enthusiastic enough for us to think hard about whether it fit within the 8aweek paradigm, or was deserving of it’s own product path.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware of the outcome, however at the time it required significant soul searching on our part. We had put so much emotional and physical energy into developing 8aweek, and our user base was nearly fanatical. We had presented 8aweek to over 150 investors at demo day, and were hot and heavy into the fund raising process, so the thought of switching gears onto a new product was daunting. But we also saw a unique opportunity in our new sidebar concept to develop an extremely innovative way of customizing the web as you browse. We were extremely passionate about the idea, and in the end, we recognized that we couldn’t pass up this opportunity, since it had the chance to really change how people browse the web. As a result, Socialbrowse was born.

The initial feature set of our Socialbrowse prototypes look nothing like the current product. Since our focus started with saving time, Socialbrowse initially was a sidebar control panel for altering the page you are on to find good content faster. Among other options, you could make old links disappear from the page, you could make the newest links “glow”, and you could remove Flash objects and images to declutter the page. The only aspect that remains today is the embedded user links, and that was the seed from which our current product grew.

As we continued to develop Socialbrowse, our focus evolved gradually from saving time to sharing and discovering content socially. We narrowed our feature set to support this focus more fully and the result of this process is the product you see today. Our goals are simple are to make it easy to share links and discover good content and we are rapidly iterating our product to this end. As we continue to grow, the product will evolve based on our user’s feedback and hopefully become a must-have extension to every browser. And if you find you’re spending too much time on Socialbrowse - well, there’s always 8aweek!