InfoTales

Apache web access logs provide vital information about visits, visitors and requests served by Apache web server. Each request is logged by the web server so the log file size can increase at high speed. If the log file size is small it is easy for apache to append lines. On other hand as the size of file grows, web server require more server resources to maintain logs.

If the access log file size reaches to around 4GB on windows machine, apache will be very slow to respond and will hurt the web application performance badly. You should keep checking log file size regularly to make sure its within acceptable range. Access log file is normally found in logs/access.log under the apache installation. Read the rest of this entry »

Based on Google Analytics (GA) visitor stats blow are the most visited pages on this blog during July, 2010.

1. Serving images from cookie less domain
2. Web Performance Optimization
3. Magento getting timeout errors, even with max_execution_time set to zero, on WAMP

Strategy Games

Strategy type games for example like these web-based games Travian, Ogame, KingsAge, Ikariam. We can learn from these games about how the strategy games work on web. But I have some other ideas to make this strategy game more interesting and user friendly.

Gameplay

Gameplay works like this:  Resources exist (like trees, iron mines, Stone, food) and they are given to you as a function of infrastructure you have built over long swaths of time (like, hours).  The purpose of this is to make people log on every day or several times a day, over weeks and weeks to maintain your kingdom.  Use these resources to build further infrastructure, which in turn either generates more resources, or allows you to build a stronger military.  You are then encouraged to attack other players using this military. The main juice of the game is the level system that brings the completion between players and on each level, they will get something unlock and it can be (new weapons, special army, more resources and buildings). Read the rest of this entry »

JavaScript files have become important part of most of the web. Placement of js file can play important role in front end performance. If you care about performance for you visitors, you must place JavaScript files properly.

Browsers allow parallel connections to a single hostname. This allows files to download faster in parallel and very helpful for web application performance. When JavaScript file is called browsers halts the parallel connections to all hosts. This is because JavaScript can alter the document dom with document.write(). Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you will be aware of Webbrowser Control and would have used in different languages like VC, C# or Delphi. By using webbrowser control, you can display your data in any format very easily, since its all about html tags.

Usually it is believed that you can display html only from a file, that you mention in some url (http or file) to display data but in reality you can generate html on runtime without using any HTML file. It is very feasible for situation where user doesn’t have enough rights to create a a file.

OK so just add webbrowser control reference in your project, create an object of IHTMLDocument2 interface and call writeln() method to write html. Interesting part is that it accepts HTML tags as well. Read the rest of this entry »

CSS has become a vital part of a web page. CSS file call or style placement can play important role in performance. If you care about performance of your web application, than you should see where to place your CSS.

A CSS file or style should be placed in HEAD element of the page. It is important because browsers render page progressively if CSS is placed in HEAD. Putting CSS at bottom can block progressive rendering in most of the browsers. If CSS is placed at bottom the browser have to redraw all elements, this hurts the front end performance for visitor and they have to see a blank page for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

A web page have multiple objects like images, css, JavaScript and flash etc. Browser have to send one http request to the server for each object. Each request adds a round trip to the server. Server have to receive and process each request and send the response.

For enhancing web application performance the rule is simple, reduce http requests. We will discuss methods to do it, in detail but first lets look why we should reduce http requests? Read the rest of this entry »

HTTP protocol have many features built-in which can help in improving front end performance of a web application. In this post we will look into these features and see how they can be used to improve performance.
The features include (find details below)

• 304 Not Modified requests
• Expires header
• Keep-Alive
• Compression

304 Not Modified requests

When a page is opened, browser downloads all objects (images, css, js, flash etc etc) and put it in its cache (if not told specifically to not to). When caching it also stores the last modified data of the object. When same object is requested next time the browser checks if the object is already in cache. If found in cache browser sends a conditional http request to server, and sends the last modified date of the object in “if-modified-since”. Read the rest of this entry »

Web application performance is increasingly becoming important aspect in web based business. Awareness about faster websites is increasing. Recently website speed has been added to ranking criteria of Google, most of the other search engines should be following soon.

Optimizing website performance includes optimization of different aspects of a site, ranging from image optimization to advance level web server enhancements. The performance does not only include fetching HTML code from the server, it also includes download time of all images, css, js files and other objects in page. Read the rest of this entry »

SEO is no longer just placing the site on 1st page of Google, now it also covers conversion, visitor behavior analysis for better conversion. Web analytics software enable website owners and marketing persons to analyze and monitor website’s different aspects.

This kind to software includes from basic stats collector to high end software like Webtrends. Web Analytics market have become a huge market and still got much potential. Most recently IBM is jumping into this market by purchasing “Coremetrics”. Coremetrics is creator of marketing optimization services and web analytics. The client list includes many large organizations.