Category: ShowSlow

A few changes were made to ShowSlow in a past couple months so it’s time for a new release – welcome ShowSlow 0.7!

Full list of changes can be seen in bug tracker, but here are the most important ones:

1. Resolved a problem with missing mod_rewrite (#43)
   A few people complained that timeplot charts and other JS-based functionality wasn’t working on details page. This was happening because mod_rewrite wasn’t enabled for the site or wasn’t compiled into Apache at all. The fix was actually done in SVN Assets project and it will autodetect mod_rewrite now and will use query string for URL uniqueness if it’s not available.
2. dynaTrace beacon and results on details page (#46)
   dynaTrace team is releasing beaconing functionality in dynaTrace AJAX Edition 2.0 (coming up in August, but Beta is already available) and you can now send results to Show Slow.
   
3. Added Google Friend Connect support for user registration and login
   UserBase (which Show Slow uses for user management) supports Google Friend Connect for a while and I just added it to Show Slow so now users can use Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, OpenID, AIM or Netlog accounts to sign in (and Google will probably support more in the future).
   
4. file:// and chrome:// URLs as well as local network URLs are now ignored (#55)
   I don’t know why, but people were submitting data for non-HTTP protocol URLs (file://, chrome://) and private networks (10.x, 193.168.x and even 127.0.0.x) to public instance (http://www.showslow.com/).

   I believe some of them might be pointless on private instances as well.

   So now Show Slow is configured to ignore those URLs, but you can configure your instance to accept internal IPs if you really need it (although I suggest you use internal DNS for development sites instead).

5. Added pagination to URL listing (#23)
   Ryan Doherty submitted a patch for list pagination for URLs measured tab which was important to increase performance of the tool.
6. Added pagination to URL listing (#60)
   I also worked on grouping of URLs so now you can configure Show Slow to group URLs on your instance for different groups within your company or just for different sites or site sections driven by different tools, for example.

Upgrading is easy – just download new version and follow upgrade instructions.

If you don’t want to wait for a packaged release, feel free to use Subversion – all you need to do is run make and it will upgrade both code and database.

If you prefer to use Subversion but stick with release code, the tag for this release is REL_0_7

As always, please report any problems with installation to the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

And feel free to contribute – there are many ways to do so:
http://www.showslow.org/Main_Page#Contributing

A few people noticed that users submitted all kinds of URLs to Show Slow including those with file:// schema and even chrome:// schema (internal schema for Firefox extension files). Some users also sent URLs with private IPs and from localhost which can not be accessed from the internet by general public.

I added some code to handle these problems and now non-HTTP URLs are not going to be accepted and private network addresses will be ignored by default too.

You can still configure your own instance to accept private network URLs by tweaking the settings, but you probably shouldn’t remove localhosts anyway.

Don’t forget to run deleteignored.php to remove measurements for URLs that were not supposed to be tracked.