15 April 2019 0 comments Javascript, ReactJS, Python, Web development
A couple of months ago my colleague Michael @mythmon Cooper wanted to add a feature to the front-end code of Whatsdeployed and learned that the whole front-end is spaghetti jQuery code. So, instead, he re-wrote it in React. My only requirements were "Use create-react-app and no redux", i.e. keep it simple.
We also took the opportunity to rewrite some of the ways that URLs are handled. It used to be that a "short link" would redirect. For example GET /s-5HY would return 302 to Location: ?org=mozilla&repo=tecken&name[]=Dev&url[]=https://symbols.dev.mozaws.net/__version__&name[]=Stage... Basically, the short link was just an alias for a redirect. Just like those services like bit.ly or g.co. Now, the short link is a permanent fixture. The short link is included in the XHR calls to the server for getting the relevant data.
All old URLs will continue to work but now the canonical URL becomes /s/5HY/mozilla-services/tecken, for example. The :org/:repo
isn't really necessary because the server knows exactly what 5HY (in this example means), but it's nice for the URL bar's memory.
Another thing that changed was how it can recognize "bors commits". When you use bors, you put a bunch of commits into a GitHub Pull Request and then ask the bors bot to merge them into master. Using "bors mode" in Whatsdeployed is optional but we believe it looks a lot more user-friendly. Here is an example of mozilla/normandy with and without bors toggled on and off.
Without "bors mode"
With "bors mode"
Thank you mythmon!
Lastly, hopefully this will make it a lot easier to contribute. Check out https://github.com/peterbe/whatsdeployed. All you need is Python 3, a PostgreSQL, and almost any version of Node that can run create-react-apps. Ping me if you find it hard to get up and running.
12 April 2019 0 comments Web Performance, Nginx, Web development
tl;dr; The global average response time of serving an image from my NYC DigitalOcean server compared to a CDN is almost 10x.
KeyCDN is a CDN service that I use for side-projects. It's great. It has about ~35 edge locations. I don't know much about how their web servers work but I can't imagine it's much different from the origin server. In principle.
The origin server is my DigitalOcean (6 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, Ubuntu 14) droplet. It's running an up-to-date CloudFlare build of Nginx and the static images are served straight from (SSD) disk with a 4 weeks TTL (max-age=2419200,public,immutable). The SSL is done with LetsEncrypt and I'm somewhat confident the Nginx is decently configured and uses HTTP/2.
So the CDN, on songsearch-2916.kxcdn.com, is basically configured to front any requests to songsear.ch
. If the origin has cache-control headers, KeyCDN knows it can hold on to it for a while, but it's not a guarantee that it will for the full time specified in the cache-control. Either way; how does it compare?
The Experiment
I picked a random static asset URL. It's a 32 KB JPEG file. Its origin URL and its CDN URL are:
- https://songsear.ch/static/albums/2017/05/24/08/170630_300x300.jpg
- https://songsearch-2916.kxcdn.com/static/albums/2017/05/24/08/170630_300x300.jpg
Next, I set up a Hyperping monitor on both URLs as GET requests. For the regions (regions from where Hyperping will do pings from), I picked the following:
- San Francisco, USA
- New York, USA
- London, United Kindom
-
Frankfurt, Germany
- Mumbai, India
- São Paulo, Brazil
- Sydney, Australia
(I wish I had selected all 12 possible regions when I started but now it's too late for lazy me)
Then, I let Hyperping GET these URLs for a while and behold, here are the numbers:
The Results
Average response time:
- The CDN: 79 ms
- The origin: 714 ms
That's a 10x difference!
Mind you, the "average response time" is across all regions. It doesn't reflect what people get. If 90% of your visitors are from Australia, the average response times would, of course, be very different. But as an example, the origin server is in New York and there, the average response time is 26 ms vs. 105 ms which is a 5x difference.
Here are some screenshots from Hyperping:
KeyCDN
Origin server
Conclusion
KeyCDN's server is clearly fast and worth doing. It's unsurprising that it performs better far away from New York but it's surprising how much faster it is at serving than the origin when pinged from New York (5x difference).
The site is still NOT fronted by a CDN because, apart from the images, almost all content is un-cacheable. However, I need to do more research and experimentation with putting everything behind a CDN and being meticulous with setting no-cache
headers on dynamic stuff and using async tools to invalidate CDN caches when appropriate.
04 April 2019 0 comments Web Performance, Web development
tl;dr We could make the initial HTML document 40% smaller if moved from inline SVG to external, optimized, .svg static assets. But there are lots of caveats unless the SVG can be used as an image.
One of the many goals of MDN Web Docs
this year is to make it faster. That makes users happier and as a side-effect, it makes Google happier. And hopefully, being faster will mean Google ranks us higher.
I'm still new to the MDN code base and there are many things we can do. One thing I noticed is that the site uses inline SVG. E.g.
<a href="/en-US/docs/Learn">References & Guides
<svg class="icon icon-caret-down" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="28" viewBox="0 0 16 28">
<path d="M16 11a.99.99 0 0 1-.297.703l-7 7C8.516 18.89 8.265 19 8 19s-.516-.109-.703-.297l-7-7A.996.996 0 0 1 0 11c0-.547.453-1 1-1h14c.547 0 1 .453 1 1z"/>
</svg>
</a>
The site uses HTTP/2 so the argument of reducing the number of requests is not valid. Well, with caveats. Browser support for HTTP/2 is getting really good. Definitely good enough to make it worth betting on.
It used to be that there's a trade-off for making static assets external: you can potentially avoid downloads, at all, by browser caching and the initial HTML document becomes smaller. But all, at the cost of more requests.
There are other, more subtle, differences with SVG. For example, the content of the SVG might depend on dynamic data. There might be others that I'm not aware and I'm quick to admit that I don't know much about use and stuff but this article might be full of those details.
The Experiment
I wrote a script that opens https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ and extracts every <svg> tag and puts them on disk. E.g. svg.icon.icon-smile_fbf6292.svg. They have a hash checksum on the content in case two <svg>s are different (but with the same classList). Then it does the following:
- Run
svgo on each .svg to create a .min.svg. - Run
zopfli on each .min.svg to create a .min.svg.gz - Run
brotli on each .min.svg to create a .min.svg.br - Sum all inline ones total size, sum the size of all
.min.svg, sum the size of all .min.svg.gz, sum the size of all .min.svg.br.
Results
| Technique | Number | Total Bytes |
|---|
| Inline | 27 | 22,142 (21.6KB) |
Optimized with svgo | 15 | 14,566 (14.2KB) |
| Zopfli compressed | 15 | 6,236 (6.1KB) |
| Brotli compressed | 15 | 5,789 (5.7KB) |
Conclusions and Caveats
For every single MDN page, we stand to make the initial HTML document 22KB smaller. Every time. Most web developers I know often Google for something and end up on MDN and do so frequently enough that there's a good chance for a warm browser cache.
But! This 22KB is uncompressed. Since the HTML documents are served gzipped, at a ratio of about 1:4, the total inline SVGs is roughly 5.6KB. At the time of writing the MDN home page is 58,496 bytes decompressed and 14,570 bytes gzipped. So that means that we stand to potentially
strip away 40% of the document size!
Second but! There are some non-trivial differences in usage of SVG. You can't simply replace...
<a href="/en-US/docs/Learn">References & Guides
<svg class="icon icon-caret-down" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="28" viewBox="0 0 16 28">
<path d="M16 11a.99.99 0 0 1-.297.703l-7 7C8.516 18.89 8.265 19 8 19s-.516-.109-.703-.297l-7-7A.996.996 0 0 1 0 11c0-.547.453-1 1-1h14c.547 0 1 .453 1 1z"/>
</svg>
</a>
...with...
<a href="/en-US/docs/Learn">References & Guides
<img src="/static/icon-caret.914d0e4.min.svg">
</a>
(Compare this and this)
You can, instead, use <svg><use xlink:href="/static/icon-caret.914d0e4.min.svg".></svg> but it comes with its own host of challenges and problems (styling and IE support) and you still need this <svg>
tag to do the wrapping in the first place which adds bytes.
It's not always worth compressing tiny static assets. And it might be worth experimenting with what the CPU cost is for a low-performance mobile device to decompress the asset versus just eating the extra network download cost of leaving it uncompressed.
HTTP/2 is great in that it allows the browser to download external assets earlier, on the same open connection, as the initial HTML document. But it's not without risks and costs that need to be carefully considered.
21 March 2019 1 comment PostgreSQL, Django
tl;dr; SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT DISTINCT my_not_unique_indexed_column FROM my_table) t;
I have a table that looks like this:
songsearch=# \d main_songtexthash
Table "public.main_songtexthash"
Column | Type | Collation | Nullable |
-----------+--------------------------+-----------+----------+
id | integer | | not null |
text_hash | character varying(32) | | not null |
created | timestamp with time zone | | not null |
modified | timestamp with time zone | | not null |
song_id | integer | | not null |
Indexes:
"main_songtexthash_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
"main_songtexthash_song_id_key" UNIQUE CONSTRAINT, btree (song_id)
"main_songtexthash_text_hash_c2771f1f" btree (text_hash)
"main_songtexthash_text_hash_c2771f1f_like" btree (text_hash varchar_pattern_ops)
Foreign-key constraints:
...snip...And the data looks something like this:
songsearch=# select text_hash, song_id from main_songtexthash limit 10;
text_hash | song_id
----------------------------------+---------
6f98e1945e64353bead9d6ab47a7f176 | 2565031
0c6662363aa4a340fea5efa24c98db76 | 486091
a25af539b183cbc338409c7acecc6828 | 212
5aaf561b38c251e7d863aae61fe1363f | 2141077
6a221df60f7cbb8a4e604f87c9e3aec0 | 245186
d2a0b5b3b33cdf5e03a75cfbf4963a6f | 1453382
95c395dd78679120269518b19187ca80 | 981402
8ab19b32b3be2d592aa69e4417b732cd | 616848
8ab19b32b3be2d592aa69e4417b732cd | 243393
01568f1f57aeb7a97e2544978fc93b4c | 333
(10 rows)If you look carefully, you'll notice that every song_id has a different text_hash except two of them.
Song IDs 616848 and 243393 both have the same text_hash of value 8ab19b32b3be2d592aa69e4417b732cd.
Also, if you imagine this table only has 10 rows, you could quickly and easily conclude that there are 10 different song_id but 9 different distinct text_hash. However, how do you do this counting if the tables are large??
The Wrong Way
songsearch=# select count(distinct text_hash) from main_songtexthash;
count
---------
1825983
(1 row)
And the explanation and cost analysis is:
songsearch=# explain analyze select count(distinct text_hash) from main_songtexthash;
QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aggregate (cost=44942.09..44942.10 rows=1 width=8) (actual time=40029.225..40029.226 rows=1 loops=1)
-> Seq Scan on main_songtexthash (cost=0.00..40233.87 rows=1883287 width=33) (actual time=0.029..193.653 rows=1879521 loops=1)
Planning Time: 0.059 ms
Execution Time: 40029.250 ms
(4 rows)Oh noes! A Sec Scan! Run!
The Right Way
Better explained in this blog post but basically, cutting to the chase, here's how you count on an indexed field:
songsearch=# select count(*) from (select distinct text_hash from main_songtexthash) t;
count
---------
1825983
(1 row)
And the explanation and cost analysis is:
songsearch=# explain analyze select count(*) from (select distinct text_hash from main_songtexthash) t;
QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aggregate (cost=193871.20..193871.21 rows=1 width=8) (actual time=4894.555..4894.556 rows=1 loops=1)
-> Unique (cost=0.55..172861.54 rows=1680773 width=33) (actual time=0.075..4704.741 rows=1825983 loops=1)
-> Index Only Scan using main_songtexthash_text_hash_c2771f1f on main_songtexthash (cost=0.55..168153.32 rows=1883287 width=33) (actual time=0.074..4132.822 rows=1879521 loops=1)
Heap Fetches: 1879521
Planning Time: 0.082 ms
Execution Time: 4894.581 ms
(6 rows)Same exact result but ~5s instead of ~40s
. I'll take that, thank you very much.
The Django Way
As a bonus: Django is smart. Here's how they do it:
>>> SongTextHash.objects.values('text_hash').distinct().count()
1825983
And, the SQL it generates to make that count looks very familiar:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT DISTINCT "main_songtexthash"."text_hash" AS Col1 FROM "main_songtexthash") subquery
Conclusion
- Avoid "sequential scans" like the plague if you care about performance (...or not just killing your resources).
- Trust in Django.
05 March 2019 1 comment Javascript, Web development
In a highly unscientific survey of exactly 2 French native friends, I asked them what they think about formatting large numbers the "French way" versus doing it the "English way". In particular, if the rest of content/app is English, would it be jarring if the formatting of numbers was French. Both Adrian and Mathieu said they prefer displaying the number the French way even if the app/content is French.
If you have an English browser opening https://codepen.io/peterbe/pen/xBRGoN
means it's going to display the two numbers the same way. But if you have a French locale in your browser it'll look like this:
Number.toLocaleString() is now universally supported so that's no longer a worry.
For years I was using a function like this:
/* http://stackoverflow.com/a/2901298 */
function numberWithCommas(x) {
var parts = x.toString().split('.');
parts[0] = parts[0].replace(/\B(?=(\d{3})+(?!\d))/g, ',');
return parts.join('.');
}
numberWithCommas(100000000);
// "100,000,000"
and it works and is reasonably fast too but it's so tempting to not use and instead stand on the shoulder-of-browsers to supply this functionality instead. But consider the alternative:
(100000000).toLocaleString();
// "100,000,000"
The thing that's always worried me is; What will someone's reaction be if the texts are in one locale and the formatting of numbers (and dates, etc!) are in another locale?
All 2 of the people I asked say they don't mind the mixing but admit that it's weird but that ultimately they prefer "their" format.
If you're non-English browser, what do you prefer? If you're a web usability expert, please, too, drop a comment to share what you think.
22 February 2019 16 comments PostgreSQL, Python, Django, Web development
This an optimization story that should not surprise anyone using the Django ORM. But I thought I'd share because I have numbers now! The origin of this came from a real requirement. For a given parent model, I'd like to extract the value of the name column of all its child models, and the turn all these name strings into 1 MD5 checksum string.
Variants
The first attempted looked like this:
artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=artist):
names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
The SQL used to generate this is as follows:
SELECT "main_song"."id", "main_song"."artist_id", "main_song"."name",
"main_song"."text", "main_song"."language", "main_song"."key_phrases",
"main_song"."popularity", "main_song"."text_length", "main_song"."metadata",
"main_song"."created", "main_song"."modified",
"main_song"."has_lastfm_listeners", "main_song"."has_spotify_popularity"
FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
Clearly, I don't need anything but just the name column, version 2:
artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=artist).only("name"):
names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
Now, the SQL used is:
SELECT "main_song"."id", "main_song"."name"
FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
But still, since I don't really need instances of model class Song I can use the .values() method which gives back a list of dictionaries. This is version 3:
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values("name"):
names.append(song["name"])
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
This time Django figures it doesn't even need the primary key value so it looks like this:
SELECT "main_song"."name" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
Last but not least; there is an even faster one. values_list(). This time it doesn't even bother to map the column name to the value in a dictionary. And since I only need 1 column's value, I can set flat=True. Version 4 looks like this:
names = []
for name in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
names.append(name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
Same SQL gets used this time as in version 3.
The benchmark
Hopefully this little benchmark script speaks for itself:
from songsearch.main.models import *
import hashlib
def f1(a):
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a):
names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
def f2(a):
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).only("name"):
names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
def f3(a):
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values("name"):
names.append(song["name"])
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
def f4(a):
names = []
for name in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
names.append(name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
print(Song.objects.filter(artist=artist).count())
print(f1(artist) == f2(artist))
print(f2(artist) == f3(artist))
print(f3(artist) == f4(artist))
# Reporting
import time
import random
import statistics
functions = f1, f2, f3, f4
times = {f.__name__: [] for f in functions}
for i in range(500):
func = random.choice(functions)
t0 = time.time()
func(artist)
t1 = time.time()
times[func.__name__].append((t1 - t0) * 1000)
for name in sorted(times):
numbers = times[name]
print("FUNCTION:", name, "Used", len(numbers), "times")
print("\tBEST", min(numbers))
print("\tMEDIAN", statistics.median(numbers))
print("\tMEAN ", statistics.mean(numbers))
print("\tSTDEV ", statistics.stdev(numbers))
I ran this on my PostgreSQL 11.1 on my MacBook Pro with Django 2.1.7. So the database is on localhost.
The results
276
True
True
True
FUNCTION: f1 Used 135 times
BEST 6.309986114501953
MEDIAN 7.531881332397461
MEAN 7.834429211086697
STDEV 2.03779968066591
FUNCTION: f2 Used 135 times
BEST 3.039121627807617
MEDIAN 3.7298202514648438
MEAN 4.012803678159361
STDEV 1.8498943539073027
FUNCTION: f3 Used 110 times
BEST 0.9920597076416016
MEDIAN 1.4405250549316406
MEAN 1.5053835782137783
STDEV 0.3523240470133114
FUNCTION: f4 Used 120 times
BEST 0.9369850158691406
MEDIAN 1.3251304626464844
MEAN 1.4017681280771892
STDEV 0.3391019435930447
Discussion
I guess the hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest() stuff is a bit "off-topic" but I checked and it's roughly 300 times faster than building up the names list.
It's clearly better to ask less of Python and PostgreSQL to get a better total time. No surprise there. What was interesting was the proportion of these differences. Memorize that and you'll be better equipped if it's worth the hassle of not using the Django ORM in the most basic form.
Also, do take note that this is only relevant in when dealing with many records. The slowest variant (f1) takes, on average, 7 milliseconds.
Summarizing the difference with percentages compared to the fastest variant:
f1 - 573% slowerf2 - 225% slowerf3 - 6% slowerf4 - 0% slower
UPDATE Feb 25 2019
James suggested, although a bit "missing the point", that it could be even faster if all the aggregation is pushed into the PostgreSQL server and then the only thing that needs to transfer from PostgreSQL to Python is the final result.
By the way, name column in this particular benchmark, when concatenated into one big string, is ~4KB. So, with variant f5 it only needs to transfer 32 bytes which will/would make a bigger difference if the network latency is higher.
Here's the whole script: https://gist.github.com/peterbe/b2b7ed95d422ab25a65639cb8412e75e
And the results:
276
True
True
True
False
False
FUNCTION: f1 Used 92 times
BEST 5.928993225097656
MEDIAN 7.311463356018066
MEAN 7.594626882801885
STDEV 2.2027017044658423
FUNCTION: f2 Used 75 times
BEST 2.878904342651367
MEDIAN 3.3979415893554688
MEAN 3.4774907430013022
STDEV 0.5120246550765524
FUNCTION: f3 Used 88 times
BEST 0.9310245513916016
MEDIAN 1.1944770812988281
MEAN 1.3105544176968662
STDEV 0.35922655625999383
FUNCTION: f4 Used 71 times
BEST 0.7879734039306641
MEDIAN 1.1661052703857422
MEAN 1.2262606284987758
STDEV 0.3561764250427344
FUNCTION: f5 Used 90 times
BEST 0.7929801940917969
MEDIAN 1.0334253311157227
MEAN 1.1836051940917969
STDEV 0.4001442703048186
FUNCTION: f6 Used 84 times
BEST 0.80108642578125
MEDIAN 1.1119842529296875
MEAN 1.2281338373819988
STDEV 0.37146893005516973Result: f5 is takes 0.793ms and (the previous "winner") f4
takes 0.788ms.
I'm not entirely sure why f5 isn't faster but I suspect it's because the dataset is too small for it all to matter.
Compare:
songsearch=# explain analyze SELECT "main_song"."name" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Index Scan using main_song_ca949605 on main_song (cost=0.43..229.33 rows=56 width=16) (actual time=0.014..0.208 rows=276 loops=1)
Index Cond: (artist_id = 22729)
Planning Time: 0.113 ms
Execution Time: 0.242 ms
(4 rows)with...
songsearch=# explain analyze SELECT md5(STRING_AGG("main_song"."name", '')) AS "names_hash" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aggregate (cost=229.47..229.48 rows=1 width=32) (actual time=0.278..0.278 rows=1 loops=1)
-> Index Scan using main_song_ca949605 on main_song (cost=0.43..229.33 rows=56 width=16) (actual time=0.019..0.204 rows=276 loops=1)
Index Cond: (artist_id = 22729)
Planning Time: 0.115 ms
Execution Time: 0.315 ms
(5 rows)I ran these two SQL statements about 100 times each and recorded their best possible execution times:
1) The plain SELECT - 0.99ms
2) The STRING_AGG - 1.06ms
So that accounts from ~0.1ms difference only! Which kinda matches the results seen above. All in all, I think the dataset is too small to demonstrate this technique. But, considering the chance that the complexity might not be linear with the performance benefit, it's still interesting.
Even though this tangent is a big off-topic, it is often a great idea to push as much work into the database as you can if applicable. Especially if it means you can transfer a lot less data eventually.
