• Breaking News

    Friday, August 21, 2020

    Home Unlabelled TIL; Edge is not automatically updated to the Chromium version in enterprise web developers

    TIL; Edge is not automatically updated to the Chromium version in enterprise web developers

    August 21, 2020

    TIL; Edge is not automatically updated to the Chromium version in enterprise web developers

    TIL; Edge is not automatically updated to the Chromium version in enterprise

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 05:33 AM PDT

    An Update on MDN Web Docs

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 11:07 AM PDT

    The Just in Case Mindset in CSS

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 05:29 AM PDT

    The crazy story of how we got our .com domain

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 08:57 AM PDT

    What are some great quality code github repos to learn from?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 08:34 AM PDT

    Reading good quality code helps me become a better developer. Mimicking is fastest route to higher proficiency. I'd rather watch someone go over their code but the next best thing is to just read the code that is very high quality. Can you suggest few such repos. I liked Jquery source code.

    I preferably don't want to read framework oriented code. Because it requires framework specific knowledge, mostly the pattern framework imposes, and becomes obsolete in few months.

    submitted by /u/techsin101
    [link] [comments]

    I built a canvas based drawing portfolio where you can see other peoples drawings

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 02:54 PM PDT

    Please rate my portfolio

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 06:38 AM PDT

    Anything I make I find looking ugly even if it's probably not... So please let me know what you think about my portfolio, it's almost finished.

    https://nemmtor.github.io/

    submitted by /u/btckernel94
    [link] [comments]

    IP Report with Timestamp

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 02:13 PM PDT

    Hi,

    ​

    My website is being attach by click farms and this is ruining my Google Ads campaigns budget.

    I was wondering if any of you know a quick tool I can integrate in my website so I'll be able to get a report of IPs and timestamps of visitors accessing my website so I will be able to block the fraudulent IPs.

    ​

    Thank you for the help!

    submitted by /u/MrLivingLife
    [link] [comments]

    Updating Bootstrap/Jquery

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 02:08 PM PDT

    Novice here - I purchased a Shopify theme that shipped with Jquery v2.1.4 and Bootstrap 4.0. I'd like to update both of these to the latest versions but am a little bit confused on how not to break existing code. What's the best way to go about it without running into issues later?

    Thanks!

    edit: also I've looked into using jquery migrate but am a little confused about which version to use due to conflicting info on jquery's site vs their Github page. Will it examine all of my source code for deprecations or does it only work on functions at runtime? Is there an online service out there that can scan your entire js source code for deprecations/errors?

    submitted by /u/soorr
    [link] [comments]

    Why Your Load Test Will Hide Problems and Lead to Crashes in Production

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 11:22 AM PDT

    What do you do to make sure your website, backend, or API will scale to higher levels of traffic so that it doesn't crash on the biggest day of the year for your business?

    Why of course you do a load test!

    Pick any tool, paste the URL, punch in a good number of users, and wait for a pass or fail. If it fails, fix the problems and run it again. Once it passes you're all set.

    Unfortunately, this is a recipe for being unprepared and having the system crash on the biggest day of the year for your business.

    Not all load tests are equal. Or even remotely valid.

    It's very easy to create a load test that is completely detached from the real traffic conditions you will face and gives you misleading results.

    It would be like having someone drive a car around a race track, and using their performance there to evaluate whether they will be good at navigating an unfamiliar city in a foreign language with stop and go traffic and drivers honking at you from all sides.

    Your live traffic can be chaotic and have a very different impact than what you see in a simplified artificial scenario.

    Strangely when it comes to testing backend performance this is often accepted as a good approach!

    I've seen these situations with several websites, typically running on AWS clusters and handling millions of dollars and/or millions of visitors.

    On all of these it was important to know when and how the system will break down so that can be prevented. However I saw load tests being run that would only provide misleading information. There was no way to fix the problems with that approach.

    With a few changes to the load testing I was able to produce more realistic results that helped optimize the right parts and know the limits that can't be changed in the short term. Those limits can be problematic but at least it gives the business valuable information to plan around.

    Read on to see how I found effective solutions through targeted load testing!

    Real World Load Tests

    The controlled conditions of a load test can be very different from the real world results you will experience.

    If you don't do this right you may allocate way more servers than you need, you may spend months optimizing things that don't matter and delay new development, or in the worst case you may miss the real bottlenecks and have crashes when you hit high traffic levels — the worst possible time.

    All of those come with real costs. Having a few extra servers is not the worst outcome. The cost may be small relative to the engineering time being spent on keeping the system running smoothly. The others could be a real problem though!

    How do you avoid that? It depends on the situation. I'll break down where load testing goes wrong, using a couple of examples I've worked on.

    Case #1: I worked with a large eCommerce site that had a complex interaction between several systems. It sometimes got overloaded and led to missing millions of dollars in sales.

    A full load test outside of production wasn't be possible due to all the components involved. So they had to be done in the middle of the night to test the production system while avoid downtime and lost sales.

    An outside contractor was running the load tests and I noticed several issues that needed to be corrected so it produced valid results. A proper load test helped to identify the limitations of those external systems and make sure they didn't get overloaded. It also showed that there was no need to optimize other parts of the stack that had more than enough capacity, and helped to avoid wasted development effort.

    Case #2: Another site involved exhaustive testing to prepare in advance for a worldwide event that brought a lot of traffic.

    Since I didn't have data from prior years and there was only one chance to get it right, it took a carefully designed load test to make sure all the minor issues were optimized, the caching was layered and scaled correctly, and architectural changes to remove bottlenecks were successful in increasing capacity.

    Prior to my involvement, there were several unanticipated issues that had led to the website crashing in the middle of the previous event. That created a very stressful situation as the team attempted to stabilize the servers while keeping the website up to date with what was going on!

    After doing the load tests with my guidance and resolving the issues identified, there was not a single issue with the system on the day of the event. In fact some of the backend servers were running so smoothly they barely seemed to show any activity even with high traffic!

    The goal was to be over-prepared so nothing could go wrong and we were successful in doing that (although the data collected from that day could then be matched up to the load test to get an even better fine-tuning of the capacity).

    Common Load Test Failures

    Here are some load test issues I've seen. When these happen they hide the real bottlenecks and produce results that are either too optimistic (showing that it's fine when it actually crashes in production, with no sign of where the problem is) or too pessimistic (crashing in the test with a load that's a lot smaller than actual traffic, giving no information on what the actual limits are).

    Ignoring caching, repeating the exact same action

    Let's say you have an eCommerce site that involves customers searching for what they want to start the purchase process. There is some work done to process the search and then results are cached.

    If you capture that user journey and repeat it 1,000,000 times, guess what — you're just hitting the cache 1,000,000 times. Fail!

    Your load test will tell you the site can handle unlimited traffic, while it keeps crashing in production. Why?

    In real life you have customers searching for a lot of different things. Some will be more common and see a lot of cache hits. Some will be very rare and almost never touch the cache.

    A proper load test will simulate the non-cached hits. The cache probably has very high performance (although we'll address that later). The backend behind the cache is what you want to test first. And you want to see how many requests actually get that far.

    To do this you need some idea of how many different varieties of searches there are. You can get this by analyzing traffic, and confirm it by running a load test that shows the backend activity is similar to the production site.

    Once you've done this, a main goal for the load test will be to increase the variety of searches gradually and see where you hit system bottlenecks.

    You can do this by creating a bunch of different searches in a load testing tool. In one case I wrote my own simple script that recursively looped through several variants to produce as many unique searches as I needed, and hit the website with those.

    This script was sufficient since I was more concerned with how many non-cached hits could be handled instead of how many repeat requests could be handled, which is where traditional load testing tools are focused.

    Why this is important: as traffic increases you will see more hits served out of the cache, but you will also see more unique long tail searches. You need to prepare for that. If there's a major promotion for a specific item you may see a surge of traffic that is mostly focused on a few narrow searches that get cached efficiently. Either way, make sure your test is measuring the site activity patterns of your anticipated traffic!

    Bypassing caching completely

    The opposite effect can be a problem too. If you just skip the cache, or somehow make every request unique so it can't be cached, you will quickly exceed the actual backend activity generated by real traffic.

    Your load test might crash with 1/10 of the users you see in production, causing confusion. Instead you want the right balance where you get close to the number of non-cached requests that the backend has to handle.

    Why this is important: as above, it's not realistic! You might get lucky and actually fix real problems. But most likely if your test environment does not come close to production you will end up with a lot of wasted effort.

    Complete overwhelm

    On a site that regularly saw 2–3,000 concurrent users, and 5,000 customers at a time was a big day, the first load test I observed was configured to run 100,000 parallel processes.

    Not surprisingly the results weren't useful.

    Once it was dialled back to a more realistic level, and adjusted to follow real life caching patterns, the results highlighted the real bottlenecks and led to new conversations about architectural changes and product design fixes. Those were very effective in making the site more stable, and didn't take long to implement.

    Why this is important: unless you're running ads in the Super Bowl, you want realistic traffic. Can you handle 2–5x what you're used to? That's where you'll get the most useful results. In rare cases you might need to prepare for a larger burst of traffic once you have done that optimization.

    Testing the easy parts, not the hard ones

    Imagine that you have a front end, an application server in the middle, and a backend database that's not managed by your team.

    Your team is responsible for the front end and middle part. So you test them exhaustively, do a little optimization, and find that they are ok with 10x your regular traffic. Great!

    Only one problem: the external backend crashes when you have 10% more traffic than a normal busy day. You aren't really prepared for a higher load.

    But since you don't control it, should you test it? Yes! It's better to know the limitations, find ways to work around those if you can't change them, and then test the solutions to see if they actually prevent a crash.

    I'll write another article showing how I was able to stabilize a very unreliable system that couldn't be changed in the short term, using a very simple fix!

    Why this is important: even if you can't reconfigure or optimize a system that's limiting you, knowing what breaks it means you can put in smarter limits and workarounds. Then you actually can handle a lot more traffic.

    Over-reliance on one load testing tool

    Most load testing tools give you an easy way to repeat a sequence of requests many times across multiple different sources. As we saw, that often results in a load test that is not valid for your real world traffic.

    Sometimes you can configure a pattern of requests in the tool that is close enough to realistic. In one case we ended up with a suite of 5–8 different tests that we ran at the same time. The result was exactly what we needed to validate architectural changes that allowed 3–5x as much traffic as before, which was exactly what was needed.

    In another case that I mentioned earlier I just wrote a script that made curl requests. I could easily scale it up or down to do accurate load tests (or single-handedly crash the site).

    Every tool has it's limitations. Don't let that prevent you from running the tests you need! You may need to run several tests at the same time in one tool, or use several tools to fully understand what you're dealing with.

    Why this is important: use the tool that allows you to do a good test. Don't just do the test that the tool allows you to do.

    Not testing the caching system

    An easy way to avoid the cache interfering in your load tests (as mentioned above) is to either direct your requests to servers that are behind the cache so it's not in play, or make requests that can't be cached.

    However you still need to make sure the cache is working correctly. Using a separate test or a modified version of that test that verifies the backend load, you can confirm that the cache hitrate is what you expect when you have repeated traffic.

    And you can make sure that request parameters won't break the cache. On one site I worked with, there was an issue before my involvement where a surge in traffic included a new URL parameter passed by Facebook.

    The cache was not properly configured by this so it treated all traffic as uncacheable and had a hit rate near 0. This had to be hotfixed in production, with a very high level of traffic on the site, to bring the site back up.

    If you have actions that trigger a full or partial cache flush, those should be tested too. You want to make sure that suddenly refreshing a significant portion of the cache during a high traffic period won't overload your servers.

    Constant cache flushing may take away most of the benefits of the caching system. But you can test a high frequency of these actions and see what the effect is. A system that I tested was able to handle cache flushing about 100x more than we realistically expected so it was clear this wouldn't be a problem and we didn't have to spend time on this.

    Sidebar: while you're doing this you might also want to manually check that the cache flushing actually pushes through updates. If you have several layers of caching, they may continue serving old content even after you flush a lower level cache.

    Why this is important: if you have fairly consistent traffic, you can monitor and tune the cache in production to get good results. If you are preparing for a large surge in traffic then you'll need additional testing to make sure the cache works as planned, has a good hit rate, and caches the right requests.

    Not using the real distribution of traffic

    A site that I worked with used a content management system where pages could be cached but it was critical for updates to go out quickly, so there was a short TTL on the caching.

    Many of the pages had relatively low traffic and weren't that complex to regenerate. However one of the highest traffic pages, that needed very quick updates, also created a very high backend load when it was refreshed.

    There were also some infrequent user actions that couldn't be cached at all without significant changes and there wasn't enough time to do those.

    If we ran a load test that simply did each of the requests 1,000 times that would give us worthless results. It would be a mix of cached requests that don't tell us the true backend capacity, and hammering the non-cached parts way more than we needed — which could crash the system before the test gave any useful results!

    The solution required a set of tests that ran concurrently. Some of them loaded the high traffic, high workload pages and did regular cache resets to see how they handled that. Others did the infrequent actions that couldn't be cached, and ran slower to simulate the actual amount of traffic those would get.

    That suite of tests was what allowed us to get useful results, find out actual capacity limits, confirm that fixes worked, and check the stability of each part individually to make sure there were no weak points. None of that would have been possible if it simply ran through a pre-set list of URLs for a predetermined number of times.

    Why this is important: most of your traffic is probably focused on a few parts of your site or system. Your caching rules are probably optimized around this already but there may be some exceptions. If you want to test how it handles higher traffic, the test needs to approximate the behaviour of those real users.

    Getting Your Load Tests Right

    These are a few common scenarios I've seen. They all come down to the same thing: your load test has to replicate real world conditions.

    It's just like debugging in development. If your development environment is nothing like production, you wouldn't expect to find bugs quickly and produce a fix that works well. The first step is to make sure you're seeing the same thing that you do in production.

    And that's the best way to think about load testing. First make sure it produces the same results you see in production. Then increase traffic using similar patterns to create a realistic workload. As we saw above that may involve different mixes of cached vs non-cached requests and unique vs repeating requests. Once you find a breaking point that you want to prepare for in live traffic, come up with fixes and run the same test against them.

    This takes more time than just putting your URL into a load testing tool.

    Can you just skip all of this and increase your server capacity so you have no problems? Maybe. If the cost to do that is less than a few weeks of engineering time that could be the best solution.

    But that essentially means you have no load test or scalability measurement.

    You can't explain to the business and marketing teams how much traffic you can handle (especially when you expect a huge surge in traffic that doesn't happen regularly). You won't know which parts of the system scale gracefully and which parts actually get less efficient as the load grows.

    You won't come up with the best options to shield the unreliable parts and still create a good customer experience. And the added servers may not even be at the bottleneck so you might not see any benefit.

    If you're seeing crashes during high traffic periods, adding more servers has not been effective, and it's causing problems for the business, you need a real and accurate load test.

    You might have a CMS that delivers a constant stream of content, or an API that handles user requests for a popular mobile app. Either way you need to think about similar concepts of caching and traffic patterns to design that right load test that will help you.

    The end result, tailored to your specific system, is the only way to get accurate results.

    Do this and you will learn the real limitations you need to address. Before long you'll be impressing the rest of the business with the stability and scalability of the backend!

    ----------

    I'll be here to answer any questions this brings up! I'll also be posting more lessons learned on Twitter.

    submitted by /u/richard_garand
    [link] [comments]

    Why do websites no longer load in plain HTML when internet strength is poor?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 09:37 AM PDT

    Remember when your internet would be slow, and you'd try to go to Facebook (for example), and all you'd get was an ugly but sort of functional version with just the HTML? I realized today that it has been years since I've had that happen. These days, if the internet strength is poor, websites will still load CSS & JavaScript, they just won't load all of it.

    I figured this would be the community where someone would know the answer! So, does anyone here know what changed in the way that webpages are loaded when internet is not strong enough to load the whole page?

    submitted by /u/DaymanKelly
    [link] [comments]

    How hard would this be to accomplish?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 01:17 PM PDT

    I found a 3rd party website that allows people to search an entire country within Facebook Marketplace (https://searchworldmarketplace.com/United-States), because Facebook only allows you to search for an item within a certain distance from a given zip code. Now that Facebook has changed its UI, that website is no longer compatible. I know nothing about developing, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to create something similar that works with the new FB interface.

    submitted by /u/michgilgar
    [link] [comments]

    How to prevent display wrapping on a mobile device?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 04:14 PM PDT

    Advice on a website builder for a small private social club

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 03:37 PM PDT

    Hi, I belong to a private residential club. It's kind of a cross between a HOA and a campsite. The website is absolutely terrible, and I've offered to take it over, and I'm looking for suggestions.

    About me: I'm a developer, and am very comfortable with javascript, html, css, but I work for a large company and haven't set up small standalone websites of any complexity. I also don't have a ton of free time, and I'd like to be able to hand control of the site off pretty easily.

    The site can be pretty simple, it needs to allow people to do things like register cars and boats, rent campsites, put in building requests and pay dues. Cookie cutter is fine, and is probably an advantage since it will make passing it off easier.

    What I'm looking for are suggestions on tools or website builders that would allow me to put this site together and manage it relatively easily. I don't want to be worrying about writing my own transaction code, for example. Any suggestions?

    submitted by /u/RobotsFromTheFuture
    [link] [comments]

    Az Update: Microsoft365 to retire IE11 support, Azure IoT Central updates and more

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 04:26 AM PDT

    What are the advantages of creating a website through coding instead of using WordPress?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 02:32 AM PDT

    I'm a beginner web developer who knows WordPress and the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

    I learned WordPress within a few hours and practiced it by making a few websites. Now I can create all kinds of websites using templates on WordPress.

    I can create websites in HTML and CSS but they are not even close to what I can create in WordPress. My Javascript is still weak but I can understand the code.

    If I continue learning javascript and go beyond by learning their libraries, bootstrap, jquery, etc., what advantages will I have? I know it will take time to learn all these things but I'm curious to know.

    What can I do extra that I can't do on WordPress?

    submitted by /u/abdullahmnsr2
    [link] [comments]

    Cloud vs local development environment

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 10:34 AM PDT

    I'm currently taking Colt Steele's web dev course on Udemy, and just got to the part where he introduces the backend. Right now he's getting us to set up our development environment, which he offers two ways of doing so.

    The first way, is using GoormIDE (he uses Cloud9 in the course, but apparently Cloud9 isn't a thing anymore).

    The second way, is setting everything up locally. Installing Node.js, MongoDB, and setting up Git/Git Bash.

    Not really sure which path to choose going forward. Is there a significant advantage to using one over the other?

    submitted by /u/spunkymnky
    [link] [comments]

    How do you like the trend of displaying a pop up prompting the user to accept cookies?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 12:25 PM PDT

    It's an awful trend.

    *Pop-up Traumatic Stress Disorder: it was a common thing on early 2000's

    View Poll

    submitted by /u/ropeserif
    [link] [comments]

    I made a open sourced keyword suggestion tool using VueJS

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 12:21 PM PDT

    What this question mean?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 11:26 AM PDT

    Hello, guys! I am beginner and started for some time to learn front end web . I'm trying to find an answer for this question from an interview:

    " In JavaScript how do we add an element with an ID inside the HTML page? "

    I tried to find an answer for this question and the only hint i have is html DOM.

    P.S Sorry if I offended you with such a question.

    submitted by /u/simulation_robot
    [link] [comments]

    Setting aside SEO rankings, customer perception, or futureproofing browser requirements, is there TECHNICALLY any reason a read only site needs an SSL certificate?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 07:35 AM PDT

    Let's say you've got a 3 page static site with a bunch of read only content about your business, no forms anywhere for data input. Besides the considerations laid out in the question is there any benefit to obtaining an SSL certificate for this site?

    submitted by /u/hateeverythingnow
    [link] [comments]

    Python or Node.js for web dev?

    Posted: 20 Aug 2020 10:13 PM PDT

    I'm a data analyst programmer who has been developing in Python for over 3 years now. I'm looking to expand my skill set by expanding into web development. I'm familiar with python frameworks like django and flask.

    However, I'm trying to expand my skills and know very limited JavaScript. I'm trying to build a website - should I use Node and start learning that or stick with python? I'm planning to use a react front end.

    submitted by /u/saxman95
    [link] [comments]

    What query language is this? (IGDB Rest API)

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 10:21 AM PDT

    I'm looking at the IGDB API examples at IGDB Examples and see they seem to be using some sort of query language for the body.

    What query language is this?

    submitted by /u/Derfaust
    [link] [comments]

    Resources for understanding CSS?

    Posted: 21 Aug 2020 09:49 AM PDT

    I need some serious help with this.

    I know javascript reasonably well, and I can build a website skeleton, I know Django, and python, and react ... but I am worse than useless with CSS. I have tried a bunch of times to sit down and learn it the same way I have learned everything else, but every time I think I understand CSS I try to use it, everything blows up.

    I have a dozen different websites and ideas that are functional, but I wouldn't show them to anyone because they look like a horror show and the more I try to fix them, the worse they get.

    Any resources you guys have found which can help CSS make a little more sense would be appreciated!

    submitted by /u/Sol3141
    [link] [comments]
    Read more
    at

    No comments:

    Post a Comment