
Fast or Slow - uptown
https://www.fastorslow.com/
======
mmaunder
Hi all. We're really flattered to be on the home page of hacker news. Thanks!!

You caught us by surprise. As you can see we've built in the ability to
gracefully handle a lot of traffic but it's not ideal because you need to wait
in a queue until we have enough capacity. So I wanted to jump on here and give
you an update of a release we're putting out next week.

FastOrSlow does actual browser simulations from around 12 locations around the
world. When we first architected it, we wanted to provide as many locations as
possible including places like South Africa. That meant in some cases we
needed actual bare-metal servers. So we built it on bare metal in data centers
around the world.

We experienced some moderate popularity about a month ago and realized we
needed to do a better job of scaling on demand. So we re-evaluated moving on
to AWS. Around the same time AWS launched in Cape Town and a few other
locations, and so we were able to get the kind of coverage we wanted globally.

So we kicked off an AWS migration. We're days away from moving into AWS and
using spot instances to ramp up and down fast based on demand. But as I said,
you caught us by surprise.

So please give FastOrSlow a try today, but know that by around late next week
we'll be doing a much better job of handling your requests FAST without having
to wait in line.

Thanks for your interest and patience. Myself and the lead architect, Ryan,
will be here to answer any questions and of course listen to your suggestions.

Regards,

Mark.

~~~
jedberg
One thing that might help a bit is to make the profiles you've already done
public (well a curated list of popular sites maybe so you don't leak
information). Have a list on the home page, so I can see what a report looks
like, even if it's not the page I want.

Or maybe the page I want will already be there!

~~~
rbritton
Definitely worth thinking about. Here's one from yesterday that I also posted
below:
[https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/8b282a3c-db98-5b1a-98...](https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/8b282a3c-db98-5b1a-989f-00e88e253f27)

~~~
mmaunder
Oh hey Ryan. Didn't see you there. :-)

Ryan built this thing.

------
swyx
I collect sites like these! Here's my list of Every Web Performance Test Tool:
[https://www.swyx.io/writing/webperf-
tests/](https://www.swyx.io/writing/webperf-tests/) (will be updating with
FastorSlow)

~~~
huphtur
Nother one to add to your list perhaps? [https://lighthouse-
metrics.com/](https://lighthouse-metrics.com/)

~~~
swyx
added!

------
thanksforfish
I appreciate that it shows your place in line (I started at 53). This is
really polished.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Commenting four minutes later: I started at 350! Hacker News bump I guess?

~~~
twicetwice
3 minutes later, I started at 483… definitely Hacker News bump!

~~~
lalaithion
And I'm in 661, 3 minutes later.

~~~
saagarjha
I'm in 429th place…wait, that's an error code.

~~~
willcipriano
One hour later and 2151 in line ahead of me, talk about exponential growth.

[https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/244179fc-78d2-5cf3-8c...](https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/244179fc-78d2-5cf3-8ceb-b87ae9c9968b)

~~~
geerlingguy
And now just getting 500 errors :(

~~~
mmaunder
Working on it. Looks like a queue issue. Adding more workers. All kinds of fun
this evening.

Edit: From our eng team:

"We're moving about 5000 events per second now. Definitely shrinking now, and
memory usage is dropping too."

Should be good to go now. Sorry, but massive traffic right now.

------
hoten
Hi! I work on Lighthouse and Page Speed Insights (similar service to what you
got here). Nice to see another player in this space :) congrats on the HN
bump!

Wondering if you've had any pain points integrating Lighthouse that you
wouldn't mind sharing. Anything more difficult than it should be, or were the
docs lacking in some way, etc.

------
mattbgates
504 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. CloudFront attempted to
establish a connection with the origin, but either the attempt failed or the
origin closed the connection. We can't connect to the server for this app or
website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration
error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide
content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot
and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.
Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) Request ID:
Ba3iKlMjJUrRy2BYUVqVLmm4hcOF70KSJgcfFnU2SUdQFLTIriKq8A==

~~~
mmaunder
Thanks. Seeing the same thing. Our team is on it. Just woke up our head of ops
at 5am his time. Surprisingly Scott sounded awake and as if he was expecting
my call. :-)

~~~
mmaunder
Will be a brief outage as we change the instance type on a server.

~~~
mmaunder
And we’re back.

------
mmaunder
Quick update: We were generating 500s for the last 15 mins. Our worker queue
got overwhelmed. From the eng team:

"We're moving about 5000 events per second now. Definitely shrinking now, and
memory usage is dropping too."

Should be good to go now.

------
jonchurch_
Can someone post a completed report so we can peek at it while waiting in the
queue?

~~~
ryanmcdonough
[https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/2bd978bd-f107-5761-84...](https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/2bd978bd-f107-5761-8459-d17436c0a0db)

------
strikelaserclaw
It seems cool but there are like 1k sites before mine, i wonder if you guys
can implement a feature to email the report after the report is generated in
the mean time (seems like a small feature).

~~~
nodesocket
Plus, they can collect e-mail addresses they can market and target to. Great
idea.

~~~
adtac
That is spam.

~~~
ayoisaiah
How is it spam when you explicitly request to be emailed?

~~~
tpxl
You explicitly request to be mailed the results, not marketing spam.

A checkbox to receive marketing emails as well solves the issue (and yes, I do
sometimes click I want to be mailed news and marketing).

------
skilled
I don't expect the site to be fully crowded _all of the time_ , but have you
thought about adding caching for previously processed sites? Perhaps a choice
to see either a previously generated report or create an entirely new one.

The reason I ask is that I did a report last night, and checked it on my phone
in the early morning. I put my site's address in again from my desktop now,
and I see that I am 1,000+ in line. Even though a recent report was made for
this site already, I can't seem to access it.

~~~
mmaunder
Thanks. You can access previous reports but you need to save the url. And they
are cached. But this is a good idea. Thanks.

------
aaronbwebber
Tip: if your site is going to redirect from the bare domain to something else
(e.g. `[https://example.com`](https://example.com`) ->
`[https://example.com/home/`](https://example.com/home/`)) make sure you enter
the final destination, letting it redirect means that the cost of the
redirects will be included in the report, which is unlikely to be what you
want.

~~~
yodon
Unless that redirect is something your users are likely to experience, in
which case you shouldn't cheat and provide a URL that delivers a different
loading delay than visitors will encounter.

~~~
aaronbwebber
Well...in many cases all it really tells you is the roundtrip network latency,
which may or may not be something you are interested in.

In my case it actually was sort of interesting - it definitely suggested that
the redirects don't have the correct caching headers, because they clearly
weren't being served off the CDN. However, this redirect is a pretty unusual
case for us, because most of our traffic is either from SEO or links from
notifications we send users.

I agree that you should be looking at the experience most users are going to
have, but if the first experience for most users is a redirect you should
probably do something about that.

------
louwrentius
This is build by the company:
[https://www.wordfence.com](https://www.wordfence.com)

------
truth_seeker
Thank you for creating this.

It was AHA moment for me when i looked at "Geography" and "Location" section.
Pretty cool stuff.

~~~
mmaunder
Thanks!

------
taf2
How does this compare to webpagetest.org?

------
polote
Does someone mind sharing his own result so that we cant check the tool
without waiting 3 hours please ?

~~~
rbritton
Here's one:
[https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/8b282a3c-db98-5b1a-98...](https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/8b282a3c-db98-5b1a-989f-00e88e253f27)

------
winrid
Nice, my marketing site that's not even on a CDN yet gets over 90 score in all
regions. :)

~~~
XCSme
Where is hosted?

~~~
winrid
USA, CA, Fremont.

------
code_duck
I've had some issues like "There is a more recent report available for this
URL. Would you like to view it?" but then when I try to, it says "No reports
found".

------
chrismorgan
These pages use an awful lot of CPU when they’re active—in Firefox Nightly on
Windows, a completed results page was consuming an entire core, which is _not_
usual.

------
leonardosts
I'm getting "429 Too Many Requests"

------
ashtonkem
Reminds me of a similar but completely unrelated phrase from the military:
“slow is smooth, smooth is fast”

~~~
mmaunder
Shooter IIRC with Wahlberg. Love that old gunsmith in the Georgia forests.

------
omot
I got a 429 Too Many Requests on my first try...

What.

------
geoffbp
I'm seeing an internal 500 for all pages. Will try again later or tomorrow I
guess.

~~~
mmaunder
From our eng team:

"We're moving about 5000 events per second now. Definitely shrinking now, and
memory usage is dropping too."

Should be good to go now. Sorry, but massive traffic right now.

------
edpichler
Their own website is super slow.

~~~
llacb47
Why do you suppose that is?

------
mmaunder
Intermittent right now but working on it. Should be back in a few mins.

~~~
mmaunder
We came back within a few minutes. Posted an earlier update above.

------
jerzyt
Yeah, let me know when it actually works. Started at about 1200 in the queue
and 4 hours later I'm still number 81, and have been sitting at 81 for the
last hour. Sounds interesting, but I think you launched too soon.

~~~
jerzyt
Oh great, someone is down voting me. Another four hours later, and I'm still
showing #81 in the queue.

------
cinbun8
Your site eats up a lot of CPU for some reason

------
mcharezinski
500 error

~~~
mmaunder
Looks like a queue worker issue. From eng: "We're moving about 5000 events per
second now. Definitely shrinking now, and memory usage is dropping too."

Should be fixed.

------
mike_d
Edit: I was wrong. But also check out
[https://webpagetest.org/](https://webpagetest.org/) as an alternative (that
you can host internally as well)

~~~
mmaunder
We're using Chrome's Lighthouse running in containers with a focus on
normalized performance between locations, security and responsiveness. This is
built from the ground up by us.

~~~
pxtail
Are you using [https://www.sitespeed.io/](https://www.sitespeed.io/) under the
hood or is your tool custom-built around lighthouse reports?

~~~
mmaunder
Quote from the eng team: "Never actually heard of it. We're build around the
raw data provided from the built-in Lighthouse audits plus some of our own
custom ones"

