IH Under The Hood (tech perspective)

[greg s]

Bob,

Here's an article on "NAPA" which I found interesting and thought I'd pass along. You may already have heard about this, but it looks like a neat tool. I was especially intrigued by the comments at the end of the article that the NAPA code was open source and the user could tweak it to their own requirements:

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3428,a=23680,00.asp

NAPA to the Rescue

March 6, 2002
By: Robyn Peterson

The only good web page, is a fast web page. With that assumption in mind, we can move on...
The most common complaint in any Webmaster's mailbox has got to be, "why is the site so &#@#% slow?" The truth is, most websites out there are bandwidth hogs. At ExtremeTech, we'll admit it--we're not guilt free in this area either. We all have something to learn.

As Web developers, we're all working so fast and trying so hard to be innovative, we're missing easy opportunities to optimize our sites for faster performance. On our high-speed connections at the office, we may not notice that we have a problem. But any user who dials in with a 56k modem (or slower) will bluntly inform us that we need to sign up our web site for a digital Weight Watchers program.

Prescribing a technical cure-all for slow websites is about as difficult as prescribing the right flu vaccine--it works in some cases, but in others, you're just out of luck. Design is always an issue. It's tough to balance a good design with fast performance--there are always trade-offs. However, if you truly want to optimize your Web site for long run, you'll need to look at not only your design, but how your design and code are delivered to your end user. (Note that we covered many of these design issues in our Web Accessibility story written by John C. Fish.)

On the back-end, if our servers aren't maximizing the available bandwidth or are averaging higher than normal latency, it truly will not matter how light your page is--your servers will deliver it at a snail's pace.

In this article, we'll look at the front-end and the back-end of your website keying in on different ways you can optimize both of these areas. In so doing, we'll add a new open source application from Intel to our toolbox called NAPA (Network Applications Performance Analyzer), which we'll use to pry open the virtual black box that is your web site (and the associated network usage).

The bottom line: to fix a problem, you need to understand the problem. Dig in to find out how to use NAPA to realize the potential of your web site--and then use our tips to acquire the speed you need to survive.

NOTE: Even if you're not a Web Developer or a System Administrators, NAPA is a blast to play around with. So, stay tuned in and get clued in on how to use NAPA solely for informational purposes--you may learn something. (Hint: NAPA might help you decide which browser is the best/fastest for you by analyzing your browser interaction with the sites you visit most frequently.)

Also note that the current version of NAPA runs on Windows 2000 only. .....

It's a fairly long article, but a good read.

greg