Mouse in the House

Posted by mark on April 1st, 2011

URL shorteners. Lots of people use them every day – including the team at WatchMouse. URL shorteners like bit.ly, Google’s goo.gl, Twitter’s t.co, and Facebook’s fb.me are widely used nowadays, but how reliable and how fast are they really?

We took a look at the pros and cons of URL shorteners in March 2010, and thought it only fair to see how URL shorteners are performing one year later.

And, what a difference a year makes! Last year, Facebook’s fb.me was at the bottom of the list in terms of speed, but this year fb.me tops our list joining Google’s goo.gl and BudURL with 100% uptime and a much improved loading speed.

Why (not) using URL Shorteners

There are some obvious pros and cons of URL shorteners.

On the plus side:

• URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (e.g. so it fits easily in a Twitter message)
• They enable you to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL
• Some URL shorteners like t.co and mcaf.ee also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts

But on the down side, URL shorteners also introduce:

• An additional single point of failure: when a URL shortener service is down (or corrupt) the link won’t work
• Additional load time for a page to fully load

URL Shorteners Uptime

WatchMouse monitored the most popular URL shorteners from February 24 – March 28, 2011 to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 25 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. Uptime is an issue for URL shorteners because it has a direct impact on the uptime availability of the website that the URL shortener actually directs to. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:

Uptime is still clearly an issue for some of the URL shorteners, but what a difference a year makes! Last year Facebook’s fb.me landed at the lower regions of our list. Things have changed dramatically this year and now only fb.me, goo.gl, and BudURL scored a perfect 100%. And to be fair, Twitter’s t.co would also score a perfect 100% if they weren’t blocked from China, which is obviously out of their control.

According to our data, twurl.cc, tr.im and to. appear to be dead in the water and inactive with over 31 days of downtime. Digg.com racked up over 19 days of downtime, while snurl.com had over 14 hours of downtime, making them our worst performers and by far the slowest among the active URL shorteners.

URL Shorteners Speed

The performance results can be seen in the chart below:

Note that we left out the resolve time in this chart, please see the full report for a version with the resolve time included and what it means.

• lnkd.in is the slowest and adds over 700 milliseconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link (excluding the resolve time), which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience.
• goo.gl is super speedy and does a redirection in just about 100 milliseconds, which is really impressive we think.

Live URL Shortener Status Report

We continuously monitor URL shorteners and share the results publicly through our website portal. The real-time status of each of the sites and a seven-day history can be found at http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. You can also receive Twitter alerts so you know immediately when URL shorteners go down by following http://twitter.com/url_shorteners.

URL Shortener Popularity

It’s not obvious to measure the popularity of URL shorteners, but traffic metric for the domain does give an indication:

This information comes from Alexa and was requested for the five most “famous” URL Shorteners.

Seeing that bit.ly is seeing way more traffic than the others we can conclude they are doing a very good job in terms of availability and speed.

[disclaimer: bit.ly and Twitter are WatchMouse customers]

Methodology and full report

The URL shorteners were checked every five minutes from one of the 58 WatchMouse global website monitoring stations. For each short URL, only the redirection was measured, not the actual loading of the target page. The redirection was expected to complete within four seconds without any errors (like when a server error occurred or if the expected target URL location was not found in the http header). If that time was exceeded, WatchMouse verified the results using another of its monitoring stations and the result was counted as unavailable.

The full report can be found here: Performance and Uptime of URL Shorteners.

What do you think? Have URL shorteners improved dramatically over the past year or is there still room for improvement? We welcome your feedback and comments!

Posted by simone on March 8th, 2011

I am sure that many of you reading this post already know what loads.in is. If you have used loads.in before then skip to the paragraph “Getting the most out of Loads.in”.

Quick Introduction to Loads.in

Loads.in is a service that gives you the ability to see how fast your (or any) website loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide. You can read more and test our service by visiting loads.in You can also visit the post How Fast Does Your Website Load – Here and Abroad?

Getting the most out of Loads.in

So now you know how how many seconds it takes to load your site from locations all over the world. Loads.in also provides snapshots of the webpage as it loads. But, is that enough? Of course not, so we provide you with a waterfall chart for each result based on the browser profile. I believe that many of you may not really know how to read these waterfall charts so, stay turned to what follows. I advise you to load your site using loads.in, click on the waterfall chart icon and continue reading.

How to read a Waterfall Chart

Each row in a waterfall chart represents a different object such as text, image, CSS, JavaScript files. As you will see, there are some objects that load simultaneously, the number of simultaneous downloads depends on the browser’s settings. Remember that each browser renders a site differently. Using Loads.in you can verify your site’s load time using different browser profiles.

Each object requires time to be loaded which can be analyzed in the waterfall chart.

• The green bar represents the connect time, which is the time that the server needs to set up a TCP connection
• The bright pink bar represents the blocking time, which is the time taken while the object waits for another files to be completely downloaded
• The purple bar represents the waiting time, which is the time to first byte: the time until the browser receives the first byte of the object from server
• The bright purple bar represents the receiving time, which is the time the browser needs to receive the whole file

Additionally, there are two vertical lines:

• The blue vertical line shows “DOM is loaded”: when the unformatted text and HTML markup have being loaded
• The red vertical line shows “Page loaded”: when all assets of the page including images, CSS, JavaScript etc. have loaded but before the user’s JavaScript has been being executed

For a fast webpage you want:

1. As few rows as possible
2. The “DOM is loaded” and “Page loaded” vertical lines to occur as early as possible and be as close together as possible.

You can read more about understanding waterfall charts in these four articles:

• How to understand your site’s performance via waterfall chart
• Waterfalls 401: Advanced analysis for non-beginners
• How to read the AOL PageTest waterfall chart
• Firebug Net Panel Timings

Post by Ziogas Chris. I am the youngest (and most fun) web developer at WatchMouse. I started coding seriously when I was 15 years old and from then on, I’ve live & dream in this world. I always want to add new technologies to my back-pack and use it on new projects. I am pleased that WatchMouse helps me to search & learn new technologies.

Posted by mark on February 17th, 2011

Ever wonder how fast your website (or any other website) loads from different locations around the world? Especially if your site relies in part on third party content, the user experience at various cities can be very different indeed!

Using our WatchMouse Performance Monitoring service API, Loads.in is a convenient webmaster tool that allows you to measure just how fast a website loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide – on every continent except Antarctica!

Websites can be particularly susceptible to slow page load speeds when they need to load a high amount of components (images, JavaScript, third party content) to render the complete page.

The free, Loads.in tool checks your site utilizing a real browser, and provides snapshots and waterfall charts for each check.  A selection of browser profiles is available too, and include Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox

Simply enter the full URL of the page you want to check in Loads.in, and the page is retrieved by a browser at a random location. For each subsequent check you can choose a specific location*.

The Loads.in results presented include:

• The page load time of the website
• Snapshots at different times during the loading of the page
• Errors or warnings if they occur
• A complete timing breakdown of all elements of your page in a “waterfall chart”
• The option to download the timing results in the HTTP Archive (HAR) format

*Locations include: Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, Groningen, Lille, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Manchester, Munich, Oslo, Padova, Paris, Stockholm, Zurich, Bucharest, Kharkov (Ukraine), Krakow, Moscow, Vilnius (Lithuania), Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, Bangkok, Haifa (Israel), Jakarta, Kuala Lampur, Mumbai, Nagano, Shanghai, Singapore, Guadalajara, Vancouver, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Florida and NYC.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We value your feedback and hope you find Loads.In to be a useful tool and resource.

Happy Monitoring,

Mark Pors
CTO & co-founder

Posted by mark on November 23rd, 2010

Cloud computing has made it easy to build applications that run reliably even under a heavy load, and developers need to know if and when the cloud, and thus their application, is having problems.
We’re very pleased to announce today that we’ve acquired Cloud Status for iPhone, an application originally created by Alasdair Allan, noted author, software programmer and expert iOS developer. Our collaboration and acquisition of the Cloud Status for iPhone app has allowed us to not only add new features in the latest version 4.4 release, but also to make the app available for FREE to the developer community and IT departments around the world who depend on cloud based services to run their businesses.

The Cloud Status for iPhone version 4.4 release includes the following features:

• FREE to download
• Support for iOS4
• Support and reporting for Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, Google Apps, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace Cloud
• Fully supported retina display in iPhone 4

Each of the supported cloud services has a separate page and details the status for the various services provided. A quick read indicator denotes the status for each service: the status for the service is good, there is a problem with the service, or the service is down. Clicking on each service component provides further information as to the current status of that component, and any problems it might be experiencing.

We greatly respect and admire the work of Alasdair Allen on the iOS platform, and we plan to work with him in the future to create additional applications that will support other WatchMouse performance monitoring services.

For more information click here.

Posted by mark on April 19th, 2010

Traceroute is a computer network tool used to show the route taken by packets across an IP network. Traceroute is often used for network troubleshooting.

Performing a traceroute (or tracert) from your local computer can be very useful, but many times you need to see traces from different locations to gain insight into possible network issues.

As of today, our free online traceroute tool can be used to trace from 40 locations worldwide: http://www.watchmouse.com/traceroute.php.

You can see the tool in action in the screenshot below with a trace from Nagano, Japan to our central server at www.watchmouse.com.

Traceroute is already used in our Root Cause Analysis functionality. When an error occurs, two traces are instantly executed from the used monitoring stations.

We hope this is useful for you and welcome your feedback!