Jiffy: Real-World
Performance
Measurement
Scott Ruthfield, WhitePages.com
scott@whitepages.com

WhitePages.com
Wikipedia: Rotary Phone

People Search Power

Numbers
>2,000,000,000 searches/year
~500 searches/second

Very Important
Performance Lesson!
Slow is Bad.
We’re Slow.
Flickr: Just Taken Pics

How Slow?

It Ain’t Us.
Text

Then What Is It?

Reflection
• YSMV
• YCMWYCM

Let’s look at that again

Introducing Jiffy
• Jiffy (n.) - Small unit of time; tick between
system clock interrupts
• End-to-end system for measuring and
reporting on page load activity

Real Data at Scale
Flickr: smokingpermitted

Measure Anything

Real/Near Time Reporting
Flickr: mrbill

~0 Impact on Page Perf
(It works)

Jiffy Components
• Jiffy.js - library for instrumenting your pages and
reporting measurements
• Apache (httpd.conf) config - receive and log
measurements
• Ingestor - parse logs and store in any DB
• Database schema and rollup scripts
• Reporting toolset
• Firebug Plugin

Jiffy: Mark & Measure
• Mark - start timing from this point
• Measure - report elapsed time since mark
• One Mark::Many Measures

Simple Sample
Input
Jiffy.mark(”slowThirdPartyStart\");
<script src=\"http://js.slowthirdparty.com/foo\"></
script>
Jiffy.measure(”slowThirdPartyDone\",
”slowThirdPartyStart\");
Output
http://yoursite.com/rx?
ets=slowThirdPartyDone:567&
uid=[sesnGUID]&st=[startTime]&pn=[pageName]

Sample Report

Misc
• Immediate or batch submits
• Default browser event measurements
BROWSER_EVENTS: {\"unload\":window,\"load\":window}

Firebug Plugin
Bill Scott @ Netflix

Available Today
• code.whitepages.com - project link + slides
• Open Source, Apache 2.0 License
• Still a lot to do!
• More database support
• Automated configuration
• Auto-timeout tools