bachelor thesis

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining Facebook’s Site Speed team in Palo Alto, California on September 26, 2011 for a 12-week internship!

After almost two months of being in contact with Facebook, I finally got the liberating call with the verdict yesterday evening: I’ve been accepted!

Backstory {#backstory}

For those of you who want to read it, here’s the full backstory.

Excitement {#excitement}

On February 24, I was contacted via the contact form on my website by Jason Sobel of Facebook. He’s a member of the Site Speed team and mentioned their article about BigPipe (which is the technology they developed to make Facebook load twice as fast). Apparently he had come across my master thesis and my website (i.e. this website) and was interested in my work on making websites faster. Jason asked if I was up for a chat some time to find out what I’ve been working on and so he could give a sense of what the Facebook Site Speed team does. There even was a mention of possibly joining Facebook: “maybe our team would be an interesting opportunity for you?”.

This year, Performance Planet did an advent calendar again, just like last year. I was also invited to write an article, and gladly accepted the invitation. I wrote about WPO Analytics, which is what my master thesis is about. It’s quite strange to see your name appear among the big names of Yahoo, Facebook and Google, but at the same time it’s reassuring that my efforts have not been in vain.
The following article is a 1:1 copy of my “WPO Analytics” article for the 2010 Performance Calendar.

Introduction

Web performance monitoring services such as Gomez, Keynote, Webmetrics, Pingdom, Webpagetest (which was also featured in last year’s web performance advent calendar) and recent newcomers such as Yottaa are all examples of synthetic performance monitoring (SPM) tools.

In this final article in my bachelor thesis series, I explain how I proved that the work I had done for my bachelor thesis (which includes the Episodes module, the Episodes Server module, the CDN integration module and File Conveyor) actually had a positive impact on page loading performance. For that, I converted a fairly high-traffic web site to Drupal, installed File Conveyor to optimize & sync files to both a static file server and an FTP Push CDN, used the CDN integration module to serve files from either the static file server or the FTP Push CDN (the decision to pick either of those two is based on the visitor’s location, i.e. the IP address), measure the results using Episodes and prove the positive impact using Episodes Server’s charts.

Previously in this series:

In this article, I explain the rationale behind the CDN integration module for Drupal 6, which was written as part of my bachelor thesis. It supports integration with both Origin Pull CDNs (out-of-the-box) and Push CDNs (by using File Conveyor).
Note that development of version 2 of this module has already begun! Version two will also be ported to Drupal 7.

Previously in this series:

In this extensive article, I explain the architecture of the “File Conveyor” daemon that I wrote to detect files immediately (through the file system event monitors on each OS, i.e. inotify on Linux), process them (e.g. recompress images, compress CSS/JS files, transcode videos …) and finally, sync them (FTP, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront and Rackspace CloudFiles are supported).

Previously in this series:

• Page loading profiling tools
• Improving Drupal: Episodes integration
• Key Properties of a CDN

So now that we have the tools to accurately (or at least representatively) measure the effects of using a CDN, we still have to start using a CDN. Next, we will examine how a web site can take advantage of a CDN.

This weekend on Sunday, February 7, we’ll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe’s biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the Drupal devroom features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

This is the brief version of my actual master thesis proposal, which is attached in PDF format.

Introduction {#introduction}

My bachelor thesis was about making Drupal web sites load faster. 80 to 90% of the response time (as observed by the end user) is spent on downloading the components of a web page. Therefor this is also the part where optimizations have the largest effect.

To be able to prove the positive impact of optimizing the loading of the components of a web site — thereby proving that the work I was going to have done had a positive impact — I researched existing page loading profiling tools. Episodes (which refers to the various episodes in the page loading sequence) came out as a clear winner.

Also as part of my bachelor thesis, I wrote a simple Drupal module¹ that could create simple charts to compare the average page loading time per day per geographic region.

I will be presenting together with Konstantin Käfer on Front End Performance. To be more exact, he will be talking about Front End Performance in general, and I will be talking about a subdomain of that: CDN integration.
Our sessions were merged because they overlapped to some extent — so now there’s just one supercharged session instead! It’s scheduled for Thursday (3 September), at 9 AM, in the La Reserre (translated: coal-shed) room.

In specific, I will be talking about the work I’ve been doing as part of my bachelor thesis. Integrating Drupal with a CDN was quite painful previously, but by using the CDN integration module, you can choose for either:

In this very brief article, I highlight the key properties of CDNs: what differentiates them and which technical implications you should keep in mind.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity.

It is extremely hard to decide which CDN to use. In fact, by just looking at a CDN’s performance, it is close to impossible (see “Content Owners Struggling To Compare One CDN To Another” and “How Is CDNs Network Performance For Streaming Measured?”)!

In this article, I explain what was required to integrate the Episodes page loading performance monitoring system with Drupal.
Episodes was written by Steve Souders, whom is well-known for his research on high performance web sites and has authored multiple books on this subject.

The work I am doing as part of bachelor thesis on improving Drupal’s page loading performance should be practical, not theoretical. It should have a real-world impact.

To ensure that that also happens, I wrote the Episodes module. This module integrates the Episodes framework for timing web pages (see the “Episodes” section in my “Page loading profiling tools” article) with Drupal on several levels — all without modifying Drupal core: