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Happy Holidays everyone!
Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.
RESTful APIs have become increasingly popular both among web services and developers and are easy to serve up with the same software used for regular web pages. In May of 2010, 74% of web APIs used REST as their protocol.
When setting up servers for a REST API it can make sense to use a web server software that is a bit more lightweight than what you’d use for a full-blown website. The gains are, at least in theory, that each API server that way could handle more requests since it would be less taxing on system resources.
But is that what actually happens, or do most web services just put up an Apache server, same as they would do for a regular website?
How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?
This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.
This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users.
Web developers fight a constant struggle: They want to use modern web browser features, but they also need to take browser adoption into consideration. If a large portion of their users run older versions of browsers, web developers will be limited in what they can accomplish.
With this in mind, we decided to find out how many people are running the latest version of their browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera.
You probably hate slow websites. So do we, and it’s pretty safe to say that it’s a universal rule.
There are a number of factors that can make a web page slow to load, both on the client side (the browser) and on the server side, but one really big factor is page size, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this article. Hopefully you’ll pick up some useful information along the way.
Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.
Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.
Google’s Chrome web browser has only been around for two years, but with an almost frantic pace of development it’s already gone through more iterations in that brief time than many other software products do in a decade. Chrome is now up to version 6, and has a rapidly increasing share of the web browser market. It’s now in third place after Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Before Chrome arrived, Mozilla’s Firefox was the darling of the techie crowd (and in many regards it still is, but Chrome is a great, looming shadow on the horizon). Now, Firefox growth has flatlined. It’s still by far the largest web browser after Internet Explorer, but it’s no longer gaining market share.
Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it.
We’re talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web.
And it has a price.
User behavior differs greatly between websites. We wanted some hard data on what kind of websites get the most page views out of their visitors, and examined the top 1,000 websites on the Internet to find out.
What we specifically looked at was monthly page views per unique visitor. We calculated this number using traffic data from Google Ad Planner, then sorted the list by that number to create a “page views per visitor” top list.
The results, although not entirely unexpected, are interesting.
At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.
