HalfLoaded.com

A really interesting post was placed on the Royal Pingdom blog that compared average load time and up time of operating system websites. The author took measurements from October 17th through November 17th. He used 16 Linux distributions, Apple.com and Microsoft.com. While his results were interesting, I felt a correlation between page size and load time should be included. I asked the author about this and he responded, “from a user perspective it doesn’t really matter what size the web page is. All that matters is how they experience the load time.”

I created the chart below based off his data and a current size snapshot of the same web pages. I used a Firefox add-on called lori or Line-of-request info to measure the complete size of the page including images and anything stored in cache.

The following two charts show the actual size of each page including scripts, images and html and their speed to load in KBps based on the data from Pingdom.

OS Vendor Website Speed (KBps)

OS Vendor Page Sizes (KB)

Conclusions

• Most popular, well funded operating systems have main pages which, regardless of size, have ample bandwidth
• If all linux sites are combined, the average speed is 130.35KBps. The median speed is 70.84KBps.
• I’m not sure if the Suse Enterprise site load time was measured correctly. It measures in at a whopping 388KB! However, its load time averaged 591ms giving it amazing results. I am wondering if the flash heavy website wasn’t being measured correctly in Pingdom’s tests.
• There seems to be a direct correlation between the funding, bandwidth and bloat of the website. I guess if you have all the bandwidth you could ever want, file size doesn’t matter. Unless you want to be nice to those of us with SLOW INTERNET!
• It is interesting to point out that even those with the slowest transfer speeds will still usually beat out the loading of the bloated pages from a users perspective. This is ultimately what really matters as pointed out by Pingdom.
• PC Linux OS could really do themselves a favor and get rid of some bloat!
• Apple and Ubuntu seem to be the most balanced between size, bandwidth and load times.

So, as most of those who know could have guessed, I’ve become the computer fix-it guy over here. Between our firewalls, proxies and lack of reliable phones, troubleshooting is made difficult. The past week, I have had to fix four computers. That makes nine complete format and OS reinstalls. Of those, all nine had Windows Vista installed. I’m not a Vista guru but it seems to me that Vista was rushed to market. In every case, the only resort available was to upgrade them to XP. I say upgrade because the stability and performance after moving them to XP was remarkable. Every Marine was glad to have the reboots snappy and system stable. Most of them just figured the slowness of their computers was due to the laptop and not due to the bloated operating system Microsoft released.

Only one of them I was able to salvage. I found a nice little hack to reset any users password using Linux and some intuitive programming. This is definitely one of those “must have”’s for the toolbox. The funny thing was, once I restored the Marine’s password, he asked if I could put XP on his laptop just because Vista was so annoying, bloated and slow.

I was also reading a story on how RedHat plans to capitalize on Microsoft’s release of Vista and the slowdown in the economy. I guess both of these type of events have, historically, led to the adoption of alternative software and operating systems. I really hope so. It would be nice to see some more competition out there. Mac has made a nice stand recently with their products. I guess we will see.

For me, I look forward to the late November release of Fedora 10. I’m going to be building up a new computer based on the “Ultimate Budget Box” on Ars Technica’s website. Sub-$500 isn’t bad for a full system with speakers, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Plus, it only pulls 90 watts which will help with the electricity bill.

Anyway, I guess this is all wishful thinking.

I’ve been having a strange issue with a PCMCIA card on my wife’s computer. Every time the machine is rebooted, you are required to “Scan for Hardware Changes” in device manager. It does not automatically detect that the PCMCIA card is still plugged in. After searching google high and low for a solution, I thought about seeing if I could write a script that would automatically run a hardware scan at logon. Here is what I came up with:

1. Download DevCon.exe from Microsoft: DevCon.exe
2. Extract either the 32-bit or 64-bit executable to C:\Windows\System32\
3. Create a file called: “devcon_rescan.cmd”
4. Put the following text in it:
   @echo off
devcon.exe /rescan
5. Copy the file to C:\Windows\System32\
6. Open the registry editor: Start –> Run –> regedit
7. Go To: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
8. Create a new string value called: DevCon
9. Right click the new value and select Modify. Type in the path to the batch file you made (i.e. “C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\devcon_scan.cmd”)

Hope this helps somebody.

I finally got around to the latest version of adumass. This was a major release as it fixed some pretty serious bugs and also greatly improved the UI and backend code. I also added a few functions for data validation. Thanks to all those that have helped and submitted support requests. The next version should have a translation pack for those users that don’t habla englais.