Ask HN: How fast is your site? (A short bootstrap story) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How fast is your site? (A short bootstrap story)

11 pointsdelano16 comments

Hi HN,

Today I opened up the first public version of a product I've been working on: it's a performance monitoring service called Stella that's like Pingdom for makers.

http://www.blamestella.com/

Some background: I stopped working full time 2 years ago to focus on my own projects. I put everything I owned in storage, took a month off, and then moved in with my mom to cut costs (to a small town in the Netherlands). I spent the first year learning and writing Ruby and this past year learning everything I could about building a product and running a business.

It's a much longer road than I first expected and who knows where it will lead, but I'm really happy I took the plunge!

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Good, but took me a little while to work out the result interface. What are the bars all about?

Good question. We're playing around with all kinds of options. Right now:

- the bar on the left is the average of all sites tested in the previous week.

- the bar on the right is the site you're checking.

Each bar is broken down into the slowest, fastest, and average response times. You want to keep an eye out for large differences between each of these.

I like the idea and the tool but yeah, the results made me go "Huh?":

- "solutious averages" means nothing to me.

- What does the size of the bars mean, I get lots of blue, is that good?

- It says "SD 0.00" several times, what?

I do like that it simulates multiple users and requests and worked so smoothly. Will we be able to tune the number of tests run?

The summary results on the left should be the first thing you see with details later. The funny graph was what drew my eye first.

Good points. We certainly have some work to do yet!

- I need to think more about what would make sense in just a couple words.

- Ya, lots of blue is good; lots of red is bad. This is a work in progress.

- SD == standard deviation. Lower is better.

Ya, you'll definitely be able to play around with the test parameters yourself. We included them in an earlier prototype but took them out b/c they introduced some non-trivial UI/UX challenges.

I had the same problem.. unsure about how to interpret the data. Otherwise it's great :)

I actually used it, so that's a start!

Also, congrats on making something!!!

Thanks for the congrats. It feels good to ship!

Very nice. I enjoy I seeing a fellow Dutchman doing something different. Sure, there are some improvements you could do design wise, but don't worry, just keep on going and you'll figure it out eventually. :-)

That's good advice!

It runs pretty well against http://127.0.0.1 :-)

Ah, debugging code. Thanks for finding that so quickly! (it's fixed)

I love that you accept mail, twitter and phone for launch notification.

Haha, thanks.

That works well, but the presentation is a little hard on the eyes.

Thanks, I'll pass that on.

Good job! Looks like a web interface to apache bench :)

That's funny, I actually considered doing that at one point.

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