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Category Archives for "Networking"

Discovering what’s slowing down your website with Web Analytics

Discovering what’s slowing down your website with Web Analytics
Discovering what’s slowing down your website with Web Analytics

Web Analytics is Cloudflare’s privacy-focused real user measurement solution. It leverages a lightweight JavaScript beacon and does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or localStorage, to collect usage metrics. Nor does it “fingerprint” individuals via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data.

Cloudflare Web Analytics makes essential web analytics, such as the top-performing pages on your website and top referrers, available to everyone for free, and it’s becoming more powerful than ever.

Focusing on Performance

Earlier this year we merged Web Analytics with our Browser Insights product, which enabled customers proxying their websites through Cloudflare to evaluate visitors’ experience on their web properties through Core Web Vitals such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID).

It was important to bring the Core Web Vitals performance measurements into Web Analytics given the outsized impact that page load times have on bounce rates. A page load time increase from 1s to 3s increases bounce rates by 32% and from 1s to 6s increases it by 106% (source).

Now that you know the impact a slow-loading web page can have on your visitors, it’s time for us to make Continue reading

Optimizing images on the web

Optimizing images on the web
Optimizing images on the web

Images are a massive part of the Internet. On the median web page, images account for 51% of the bytes loaded, so any improvement made to their speed or their size has a significant impact on performance.

Today, we are excited to announce Cloudflare’s Image Optimization Testing Tool. Simply enter your website’s URL, and we’ll run a series of automated tests to determine if there are any possible improvements you could make in delivering optimal images to visitors.

Optimizing images on the web

How users experience speed

Everyone who has ever browsed the web has experienced a website that was slow to load. Often, this is a result of poorly optimized images on that webpage that are either too large for purpose or that were embedded on the page with insufficient information.

Images on a page might take painfully long to load as pixels agonizingly fill in from top-to-bottom; or worse still, they might cause massive shifts of the page layout as the browser learns about their dimensions. These problems are a serious annoyance to users and as of August 2021, search engines punish pages accordingly.

Understandably, slow page loads have an adverse effect on a page's “bounce rate” which is the percentage of Continue reading

New: ipSpace.net Design Clinic

In early September, I started yet another project that’s been on the back burner for over a year: ipSpace.net Design Clinic (aka Ask Me Anything Reasonable in a more structured format). Instead of collecting questions and answering them in a podcast (example: Deep Questions podcast), I decided to make it more interactive with a live audience and real-time discussions. I also wanted to keep it valuable to anyone interested in watching the recordings, so we won’t discuss obscure failures of broken designs or dirty tricks that should have remained in CCIE lab exams.

New: ipSpace.net Design Clinic

In early September, I started yet another project that’s been on the back burner for over a year: ipSpace.net Design Clinic (aka Ask Me Anything Reasonable in a more structured format). Instead of collecting questions and answering them in a podcast (example: Deep Questions podcast), I decided to make it more interactive with a live audience and real-time discussions. I also wanted to keep it valuable to anyone interested in watching the recordings, so we won’t discuss obscure failures of broken designs or dirty tricks that should have remained in CCIE lab exams.

Bringing the Power of SDN Automation to BGP EVPN Overlays

Some customers have asked whether Pluribus can create an overlay using BGP EVPN throughout the fabric, like other vendors do, and not just at the edge. The answer is “yes” we absolutely can do that, but unlike other vendors, we can apply the power of SDN automation to make it simpler.

The post Bringing the Power of SDN Automation to BGP EVPN Overlays appeared first on Pluribus Networks.

IBM ships high-density tape drives based on lastest spec

IBM announced the general availability of the industry’s first magnetic tapes and drives based on the LTO-9 Ultrium specification for massive data capacity and resilience.The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) 9 spec features a 50% improvement in capacity over LTO-8, which translates to 18TB native capacity, or 45TB after data is compressed. Fujifilm and Sony announced media last month, but IBM is the first with a drive.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM ships high-density tape drives based on lastest spec

IBM announced the general availability of the industry’s first magnetic tapes and drives based on the LTO-9 Ultrium specification for massive data capacity and resilience.The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) 9 spec features a 50% improvement in capacity over LTO-8, which translates to 18TB native capacity, or 45TB after data is compressed. Fujifilm and Sony announced media last month, but IBM is the first with a drive.To read this article in full, please click here

Russ’ Rules of Network Design

We have the twelve truths of networking, and possibly Akin’s Laws, but is there a set of rules for network design? I couldn’t find one, so I decided to create one, containing 18 laws I’ve listed below.

Russ’ Rules of Network Design

  1. If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough.
  2. Design is an iterative process. You probably need one more iteration than you’ve done to get it right.
  3. A design isn’t finished when everything needed is added, it’s finished when everything possible is taken away.
  4. Good design isn’t making it work, it’s making it fail gracefully.
  5. Effective, elegant, efficient. All other orders are incorrect.
  6. Don’t fix blame; fix problems.
  7. Local and global optimization are mutually exclusive.
  8. Reducing state always reduces optimization someplace.
  9. Reducing state always creates interaction surfaces; shallow and narrow interaction surfaces are better than deep and broad ones.
  10. The easiest place to improve or screw up a design is at the interaction surfaces.
  11. The optimum is almost always in the middle someplace; eschew extremes.
  12. Sometimes its just better to start over.
  13. There are a handful of right solutions; there is an infinite array of wrong ones.
  14. You are not immensely smarter than anyone else in Continue reading

Troubleshooting Webinar this Friday

I’m teaching my troubleshooting webinar this Friday. I’ve revamped the slides entirely, so this will likely be a big change for anyone who’s attended previous versions of this. Three hours, 109 slides, and interaction through the chat window … all to develop some really good skills in how to troubleshoot. For those who are curious, I was taught formal troubleshooting skills in my early life in electronics, learning my lessons on ILS, RADAR, and radio systems of various kinds. This webinar is my adaptation of those skills for network engineers.

You can register here.

What’s your Digital Dilemma?

There are many ways to describe the need for IT organizations to do things better. There are multiple opportunities to get it wrong. Certainly, compromising today in the name of tomorrow is what many IT leaders now call the digital dilemma. Derek Britton of Micro Focus offers the vendor perspective.

Managing and monitoring swap space on Linux

Most of us don't often think about swap space unless we run into a problem on our systems that suggests we don't have enough. Even so, viewing and gauging the adequacy of swap space on a system is not overly complicated, and knowing what's normal for your system can help you spot when something is wrong. So let's check out some commands that can help you look into your swap space. But first, let's review some fundamentals.What swap space is and how it's used Swap space is disk space that acts something like an extension of memory. It gets used when the system's physical memory (RAM) is full and the system needs more memory resources. It's called "swap" because the system will move some inactive pages in memory into the swap space so that it can accommodate more data in RAM. In other words, it provides a way to free up RAM on a busy system.To read this article in full, please click here

Managing and monitoring swap space on Linux

Most of us don't often think about swap space unless we run into a problem on our systems that suggests we don't have enough. Even so, viewing and gauging the adequacy of swap space on a system is not overly complicated, and knowing what's normal for your system can help you spot when something is wrong. So let's check out some commands that can help you look into your swap space. But first, let's review some fundamentals.What swap space is and how it's used Swap space is disk space that acts something like an extension of memory. It gets used when the system's physical memory (RAM) is full and the system needs more memory resources. It's called "swap" because the system will move some inactive pages in memory into the swap space so that it can accommodate more data in RAM. In other words, it provides a way to free up RAM on a busy system.To read this article in full, please click here

Stateful Switchover (SSO) 101

Stateful Switchover (SSO) is another seemingly awesome technology that can help you implement high availability when facing a broken non-redundant network design. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

  • A network device runs two copies of the control plane (primary and backup);
  • Primary control plane continuously synchronizes its state with the backup control plane;
  • When the primary control plane crashes, the backup control plane already has all the required state and is ready to take over in moments.

Delighted? You might be disappointed once you start digging into the details.

Stateful Switchover (SSO) 101

Stateful Switchover (SSO) is another seemingly awesome technology that can help you implement high availability when facing a broken non-redundant network design. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

  • A network device runs two copies of the control plane (primary and backup);
  • Primary control plane continuously synchronizes its state with the backup control plane;
  • When the primary control plane crashes, the backup control plane already has all the required state and is ready to take over in moments.

Delighted? You might be disappointed once you start digging into the details.

Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth

Gartner says the current paucity of skilled IT workers is foiling the adoption of cloud, edge computing, and automation technologies.In its "2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap" based on surveying 437 global firms, Gartner found that IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant barrier to deploying emerging technologies, including compute infrastructure and platform services, network security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth

Gartner says the current paucity of skilled IT workers is foiling the adoption of cloud, edge computing, and automation technologies.In its "2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap" based on surveying 437 global firms, Gartner found that IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant barrier to deploying emerging technologies, including compute infrastructure and platform services, network security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage.To read this article in full, please click here