# SAS is using Google PageSpeed Service



## Drew

_Note: This is something that may not be active for you immediately, but should be active for everyone over the next 24 hours._

We have been given the opportunity to try Google's Page Speed Service:


> Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe.


This should answer any questions you have about the service:
https://code.google.com/speed/pss/faq.html

It should significantly speed up the site, especially at peak times when the site can start to slow down a bit.

That said, there's a possibility that it might break some minor aspects of the site.

Please let me know if you notice anything that doesn't work or look right!

Also, share your thoughts on if the site seems to be loading faster for you or if you don't really notice a difference. The real tests will be Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings.

Thanks!
Drew


----------



## Ashley1990

Okeei..!! Hey drew SAS has been pretty slow here for some days..it hangs too..i dnt know its happening to all of us ..but there had been many errors here..the page expired suddenly n then it hanged...tooo


----------



## Drew

Ashley1990 said:


> Okeei..!! Hey drew SAS has been pretty slow here for some days..it hangs too..i dnt know its happening to all of us ..but there had been many errors here..the page expired suddenly n then it hanged...tooo


I just activated Google Page Speed Service and it will start to work over the next 24 hours.

You should notice a difference in the speed of the site!


----------



## Ashley1990

Yes today is somewhat better today..from yesterday morning I guess...thanks drew..hope u r fine these days....i want to thanks u for this site...!!! m better these days


----------



## Ventura

Hrm I got got some weird error message 401 or something :stu - not sure if it has anything to do with it, got it around 4:20am (a few minutes ago). It has happened a lot when I try to view my profile, though for the past few hours. Refreshing the page, does make it go away.


----------



## Duke of Prunes

Are there any big brother-esque implications to this? How's the privacy policy? Surely there are caching/minimising optimisers that don't require the use of servers operated by a company that would just love to inject adverts/trackers, or capture form submissions and associate them with their own users (which the new privacy policy allows for by IP matching among other things, at least across the majority of their services).


----------



## millenniumman75

As long as they don't compromise privacy. :stu :afr


----------



## huh

I'm not sure if this is at all related, but just since today all the text boxes on the site are gray now instead of white. It's kind of strange. This happens to me on both Windows and Linux using Firefox. And I have tried to completely clear the cache/temp files in both. It doesn't seem to affect anything, as the boxes still work. It's just weird because it makes it look as if the text box is disabled.


----------



## Drew

Ventura said:


> Hrm I got got some weird error message 401 or something :stu - not sure if it has anything to do with it, got it around 4:20am (a few minutes ago). It has happened a lot when I try to view my profile, though for the past few hours. Refreshing the page, does make it go away.


Those errors happen everyday around 4:10 to 4:30am because of the daily server backup.

Can you share a screenshot next time it happens for your profile outside of that 4:10 to 4:30am window? You can email it to [email protected] if you prefer. Thanks!



Duke of Prunes said:


> Are there any big brother-esque implications to this? How's the privacy policy? Surely there are caching/minimising optimisers that don't require the use of servers operated by a company that would just love to inject adverts/trackers, or capture form submissions and associate them with their own users (which the new privacy policy allows for by IP matching among other things, at least across the majority of their services).





millenniumman75 said:


> As long as they don't compromise privacy. :stu :afr


It's a legitimate concern, but Google is already crawling all the pages, analyzing the content for search/Adsense and caching pages too. My understanding is that this service isn't doing anything with content from a privacy perspective that isn't already being done with caching. Instead it focuses more on optimizing what it is storing. I'll look into this more though.



huh said:


> I'm not sure if this is at all related, but just since today all the text boxes on the site are gray now instead of white. It's kind of strange. This happens to me on both Windows and Linux using Firefox. And I have tried to completely clear the cache/temp files in both. It doesn't seem to affect anything, as the boxes still work. It's just weird because it makes it look as if the text box is disabled.


Yeah, that appears to be the first UI related issue.

I also just noticed that the multi-select button doesn't change from "+" to "-", even though the functionality still works.

I'll get them fixed!

Thanks for the feedback guys.


----------



## Duke of Prunes

They may have been crawling these pages already, but not serving them up, giving them access to all HTTP requests to the site, including form data.

EDIT: I may have been wrong. The pages themselves are showing up in my cache as ‘socialanxietysupport.com’, and only the images/scripts/stylesheets are coming from ‘1-ps.googleusercontent.com’. Does the site's own webserver just have some module that modifies the script/style/img tags to point them at Google's cache? That's not quite so intrusive, I guess, as long as the page itself isn't being served from Google. I guess you can't expect a caching service to serve dynamic pages.


----------



## Drew

Duke of Prunes said:


> They may have been crawling these pages already, but not serving them up, giving them access to all HTTP requests to the site, including form data.
> 
> EDIT: I may have been wrong. The pages themselves are showing up in my cache as 'socialanxietysupport.com', and only the images/scripts/stylesheets are coming from '1-ps.googleusercontent.com'. Does the site's own webserver just have some module that modifies the script/style/img tags to point them at Google's cache? That's not quite so intrusive, I guess, as long as the page itself isn't being served from Google. I guess you can't expect a caching service to serve dynamic pages.


I will email Google Page Service for a clarification on their privacy policy and how it relates to Google's new "unified" privacy policy as a whole.

I think newer services like these and Insula are trying to implement "intelligent caching" that caches dynamic content in a way that detects when changes have been made. Obviously, it hasn't been perfected yet and the best route to go is something like memchaced or Varnish on the server itself.

Edit: Thanks for bringing up things like this. It's obvious you know your stuff and I appreciate having your perspective!


----------



## Drew

I've fixed the gray background for the text editor in Firefox. It is now white. Can you try clearing your cache and seeing if that's the case on your end?

Still working on the Multi-Quote button...


----------



## Duke of Prunes

Drew said:


> I will email Google Page Service for a clarification on their privacy policy and how it relates to Google's new "unified" privacy policy as a whole.
> 
> I think newer services like these and Insula are trying to implement "intelligent caching" that caches dynamic content in a way that detects when changes have been made. Obviously, it hasn't been perfected yet and the best route to go is something like memchaced or Varnish on the server itself.
> 
> Edit: Thanks for bringing up things like this. It's obvious you know your stuff and I appreciate having your perspective!


I appreciate it when admins care about things like this


----------



## tea111red

I've not noticed a difference in the speed of the site so far. I've noticed the other problems mentioned though.


----------



## Spangles Muldoon

Drew said:


> It's a legitimate concern, but Google is already crawling all the pages, analyzing the content for search/Adsense and caching pages too. My understanding is that this service isn't doing anything with content from a privacy perspective that isn't already being done with caching. Instead it focuses more on optimizing what it is storing. I'll look into this more though.


As I currently understand the situation, here's the big difference between Google AdSense and Google PageSpeed:

* With Google AdSense, Google scans content on the page and generates on the page ads relevant to that content. Google also uses cookies on your computer to generate ads based on your browsing history on SAS and other sites, but these cookies do not identify you personally. Since SAS continues to serve pages to your IP address (your personal computer) from its own servers and not from Google's servers, Google does not learn from AdSense (as far as I know) your personal IP address, so Google cannot associate with you an interest in anxiety, depression, suicide or anything else. In particular, Google does not know the content of the posts you have made yourself.

* With Google PageSpeed, the Domain Name System (DNS) directs page requests for SAS to Google's servers. In other words, when you request content on SAS, you are now making that request to Google, not to SAS. You are now sending your personal IP address to Google so that Google can return the page (and its content) you have requested. Google can now associate with your IP address (and you) your interest in anxiety, depression, suicide or anything else on the page. In particular, Google now knows the content of the posts you have made yourself.

According to Google's new privacy policy, which went into effect on March 1, Google can share this information with other Google services.

http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

Here is the DNS lookup your computer performs to determine where to send your IP address:

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a:www.socialanxietysupport.com

When I submit this post a few seconds from now, my IP address will be sent to this server:



Code:


ghs.l.google.com [173.194.77.121]

Google can then associate my IP address (and me) with all of the content of this page, including the content of this post, and Google can keep for all time a record of my SAS membership, all of this information to be used in the future however any future Google privacy policy allows.

If my current understanding of the situation is correct, Google PageSpeed has severely compromised the privacy of SAS users.


----------



## Ashley1990

*The page cannot be displayed*

There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.
Please try the following:

Open the www.socialanxietysupport.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want. 
Click the







Refresh button, or try again later.
Click  Search to look for information on the Internet. 
You can also see a list of related sites. 

*HTTP 500 - Internal server error 
Internet Explorer *

Hey drew m coying this for u...this site is hanging every now n then specially in morning hrs here..its 10:58 am here n SAS has been slow for two hrs....kindly do the needfull


----------



## Spangles Muldoon

An SAS user asked me (outside of these forums) to clarify my post above, and here is part of my response:



> Yes, it's a very serious escalation of Google's attempt to index, catalog and associate with a user all of his or her Internet activity.
> 
> https://code.google.com/speed/pss/faq.html#whatispss
> 
> At present, the PageSpeed service is experimental, but it is sinister....
> 
> With the Google AdSense service, Google did not learn a user's IP address. Now, with the Google PageSpeed service, Google learns a user's IP address and the content of all of the pages he or she visits, and the content of all of the posts he or she makes. All of this information can be shared across all Google services.


I meant to emphasize in my previous post that my current understanding of the situation is incomplete. I am hopeful that Drew can provide us with further clarification.


----------



## Ventura

> Fetching of original content failed due to Proxy Publisher Failure TIMEOUT. If you own this domain, please consult this FAQ.


This is one of the errors I am now getting, which is annoying. It does not even let you on forums, until you refresh, I've had to clear my history 3 times 2nite to keep getting it to work? :con... hrmm.


----------



## Duke of Prunes

I can confirm that page requests are now going to Google, and 'www.socialanxietysupport.com' (though not 'socialanxietysupport.com') is now resolving to a Google IP.


----------



## Spangles Muldoon

After further research, I can confirm the following: The only reason for Google to offer the PageSpeed service is to index and catalog your activity on the site. Google associates your IP address with the content of the pages you view and the posts you make. Google has no other incentive. Google claims that its PageSpeed service improves site performance by caching pages, but Drew could have achieved the same improvement in site performance by hosting the site on faster servers, or by using forum software that caches pages.


----------



## huh

Drew said:


> I've fixed the gray background for the text editor in Firefox. It is now white. Can you try clearing your cache and seeing if that's the case on your end?
> 
> Still working on the Multi-Quote button...


It's no longer grey when I reply on the bottom of a thread, or use the reply button. However, it is still grey when I go to edit my own posts.


----------



## huh

Unsure if this related, but navigating some threads is impossible. Just recently I tried to navigate to the last page of a thread but could not get there no matter what I tried (such as manually adjusting the URL). However, people still seem to be replying to it.


----------



## MindOverMood

Ever since this has been implemented, my pictures and albums haven't been showing up correctly. Right now, 2 out of 24 pics are visible when I click on the photo album:blank


----------



## Drew

I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond sooner.



Spangles Muldoon said:


> After further research, I can confirm the following: The only reason for Google to offer the PageSpeed service is to index and catalog your activity on the site. Google associates your IP address with the content of the pages you view and the posts you make. Google has no other incentive. Google claims that its PageSpeed service improves site performance by caching pages, but Drew could have achieved the same improvement in site performance by hosting the site on faster servers, or by using forum software that caches pages.


I appreciate you taking the time to research this (as well as the others who did) and making the detailed posts that you did. I too have increasing concerns about Google.

I am waiting to hear back from the Google Page Speed team regarding if and how it falls under the Universal Privacy Policy, but already making alternate plans.

As we speak, I am writing a ticket to our host about using Google's open source mod_pagespeed for Apache. It communicates nothing with Google, but doesn't provide any of the more advanced CDN/caching functionality that Google Page Speed does. We'd probably combine this with MaxCDN for user uploaded photos because of their easy integration. We were already using Amazon CloudFront for static layout files. Finally, another option we may look into giving Incapsula a try. It's similar to Google Page Speed, but I have some concerns about the way they handle optimizations and it breaking aspects of the site (like some of the minor issues we've had on SAS). Google has worked hard on an open source project, mod_pagespeed, which has turned into a service, and it really does do an incredible job of optimizing without breaking.

I just want to be clear that I care about what you guys think and this isn't a decision that's set in stone.

However, to say "Google has no other incentive" is wrong.
1) They are obsessively focused on speed. Always have been, always will be. They have multiple public facing websites set up to teach people how to increase the speed of their regular and mobile websites, often mentioning other people's services and tools.
2) They will charge for this service eventually. Larry has been making changes at Google. They just started charging for Google Maps API over a certain threshold.
3) I hate Larry for killing off vark.com and will never forgive him...but that's kind of off topic. Tell me where else you can get a real-time answer in English in 2 minutes when you're in Bratislava and have Googled for hours on a topic that's just not documented online.



huh said:


> Unsure if this related, but navigating some threads is impossible. Just recently I tried to navigate to the last page of a thread but could not get there no matter what I tried (such as manually adjusting the URL). However, people still seem to be replying to it.


Hmm, can you provide the thread to me? You can email me at [email protected] if you want.



huh said:


> It's no longer grey when I reply on the bottom of a thread, or use the reply button. However, it is still grey when I go to edit my own posts.


I'll fix this.



MindOverMood said:


> Ever since this has been implemented, my pictures and albums haven't been showing up correctly. Right now, 2 out of 24 pics are visible when I click on the photo album:blank


Hmm, they should be appearing. Can you try clearing your browser cache and restarting it? Let me know if it still doesn't work.

Thanks again everyone for their feedback and I'll keep you updated.


----------



## Drew

Just got a reply from a dev


> Does Google use Page Speed Service to improve web search results or target advertisersing to users?
> Google does not use the information collected from serving Page Speed Service content towards improving search results or targeting advertising to end users. We may, however, use the information collected to improve the quality of Page Speed Service itself, including making pages serve even faster. Please refer to the Terms of Service for complete details.


He is going to have someone in legal get back to clarify further.
http://code.google.com/speed/pss/faq.html#usageforads


----------



## MindOverMood

Everything is showing up for me again

Edit: Never mind, it's happening again =S


----------



## Paper Samurai

Ventura said:


> Hrm I got got some weird error message 401 or something :stu - not sure if it has anything to do with it, got it around 4:20am (a few minutes ago). It has happened a lot when I try to view my profile, though for the past few hours. Refreshing the page, does make it go away.


Interwebz error codes guide:

400+ = client (your end)
500+ = server (Server end - quick, send Drew an angry email :b )


----------



## Duke of Prunes

By design, yes, but 4xx errors are often just the result of server misconfigurations. It's not exactly the client's fault if there's some screwed up permissions on the server.


----------



## huh

Drew said:


> Hmm, can you provide the thread to me? You can email me at [email protected] if you want.


It was this one...

http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/f35/unprotected-sex-really-upset-170672/index3.html

The issue ended up being intermittent. However, I was unable to get to page 3. The URL appeared to just "re-write" itself and switch from index3.html to index2.html. Perhaps an issue with the re-write rules and the way the caching now works? Hard to say I guess. It cleared itself up after a little bit.


----------



## Drew

huh said:


> It was this one...
> 
> http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/f35/unprotected-sex-really-upset-170672/index3.html
> 
> The issue ended up being intermittent. However, I was unable to get to page 3. The URL appeared to just "re-write" itself and switch from index3.html to index2.html. Perhaps an issue with the re-write rules and the way the caching now works? Hard to say I guess. It cleared itself up after a little bit.


How many posts do you see per page?

You can see your setting here: http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/profile.php?do=editoptions

e.g. 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 posts per page


----------



## Famous

Interesting, I installed the programme "Google Clean" which blocks/deletes google spy stuff, and it _activated_ indicating google spy activity on this page, but not on the rest of the site heh....

update:
I'll just add that the prog "Google Clean" gets activated by any reference to google, so thats what bounced it on this page, multiple txt refs in the thread text I imagine.


----------



## huh

Drew said:


> How many posts do you see per page?
> 
> You can see your setting here: http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/profile.php?do=editoptions
> 
> e.g. 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 posts per page


Mine is just set to "Use Forum Default", which ends up being 20 for me.


----------



## Drew

huh said:


> Mine is just set to "Use Forum Default", which ends up being 20 for me.


Interesting, I would have expected it to be lower...

Either way, what was probably happening is that you when you tried to view page 3, Google was sending a cached page for someone who had their post/page higher than 20 and that's why it kicked you back to page 2.

For example, try to view this thread, page 99:
http://www.socialanxietysupport.com...-google-pagespeed-service-170255/index99.html

Google's service should learn to more intelligently cache. Incapsula also does this and may be what we end up switching to.

If you notice this again, let me know!


----------



## Ventura

> Fetching of original content failed due to Proxy Publisher Failure TIMEOUT. If you own this domain, please consult this FAQ.


This happens a lot now.... its 8:51 am.

But happens between 2am - 10am now.


----------



## Spangles Muldoon

Drew said:


> Either way, what was probably happening is that you when you tried to view page 3, Google was sending a cached page for someone who had their post/page higher than 20 and that's why it kicked you back to page 2.


Drew,

Would you please explain why you would use a service so insecure that one user receives a page intended for another user?


----------



## Spangles Muldoon

Drew said:


> However, to say "Google has no other incentive" is wrong.... They are obsessively focused on speed. Always have been, always will be.


You have conflated Google's motives with your own. You (not Google) benefit from speed. Google (not you) benefits from the collection of data you allow it to collect.


----------



## Spangles Muldoon

Drew said:


> Just got a reply from a dev
> 
> He is going to have someone in legal get back to clarify further.
> http://code.google.com/speed/pss/faq.html#usageforads


Drew,

It's almost a week later. What have you learned from "legal"?


----------



## huh

Spangles Muldoon said:


> Drew,
> 
> Would you please explain why you would use a service so insecure that one user receives a page intended for another user?


Well, I'm not Drew, but this issue doesn't seem that insecure, the cache mechanism just isn't intelligent enough to understand how individual preferences affect it's cache. I'm guessing this view setting is stored as a session variable of some sort in VB. Is there really even anyway for Google's caching system to handle this more intelligently? Perhaps certain aspects of this site are too dynamic for this caching mechanism to work properly?


----------



## Drew

Ventura said:


> This happens a lot now.... its 8:51 am.
> 
> But happens between 2am - 10am now.


I'm sorry about that. It's not pagespeed related. It's my fault and I'm going to reply to an email the host sent us right now so we can try to



Spangles Muldoon said:


> Drew,
> 
> Would you please explain why you would use a service so insecure that one user receives a page intended for another user?


In this case, it's serving a 302 (Temporary) page redirect (a header without any content other than an explanation that it's a redirect) and not content. Google isn't stupid.

That said, vBulletin is a wreck and a sinking ship owned by a hedge fund now, so these are bandaid solutions. We've made some attempts to decrease the load by changing our server setup multiple times and introducing server side caching with memcached...although I'm not comfortable delving into vBulletin's core code, so it has limited usefulness in what it's caching in RAM (quite the opposite of sites that have tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. of GB of DB data cached in the RAM

So yes, I could dig into the vBulletin code and increase the breadth of the memcached caching, look into other server side caching options for MySQL, I could have gone through and set up the CDN on all the dynamic files (static files were already hosted by Amazon S3)



Spangles Muldoon said:


> You have conflated Google's motives with your own. You (not Google) benefit from speed. Google (not you) benefits from the collection of data you allow it to collect.


I'll answer this question for the sake of others reading this thread.

First, it's hard to label the motives of an entire corporation. There is constantly politically in-fighting about issues just like this and there are people who work there who have significant influence and care a lot about issues like online privacy.

When did you first use Google? What year? I remember the exact day I personally felt that Google had succumbed to the inevitables of being a public company and was no longer "not evil" (again, this is me, some people take different approaches ala the Google Watch guy). It was when they acquired Applied Semantics for a patent(s) and kept the domain parking aspect of the business going. I lost an enormous amount of respect for the company (this was 2002 or 2003). It's arguably inevitable with every public corporation, just to what extent.

As SAS has grown, I realized it was beyond my capabilities to manage the server, so that's why I've handed it off to a managed company and looked into services like Google Page Speed. Ultimately, you have to make compromises. Everyone does, even you It's a decision of up to what point you'll let it go. I'm not saying Google Page Speed is a compromise we are going to make long term, but it will be for the short term. I've already been in touch with Incapsula and am going to do some testing of their server with a vBulletin install.



Spangles Muldoon said:


> Drew,
> 
> It's almost a week later. What have you learned from "legal"?


Nothing yet from their legal, but their TOS is pretty clear (have you read it?).

That said, I'm...
- Trying to find a new good lawyer after the one I've worked with for years returned
- Testing out Incapsula with a similar vBulletin installation to see how it does.

I will post a new thread when I have an update.


----------



## Drew

Also, as always, if you have concerns you aren't comfortable voicing publicly, you can email me at [email protected]


----------



## melissa75

Drew said:


> *Hmm, they should be appearing. Can you try clearing your browser cache and restarting it? Let me know if it still doesn't work.*
> 
> Thanks again everyone for their feedback and I'll keep you updated.


This doesn't seem to work for me on google chrome or IE9. The photo's in some albums still aren't showing.


----------



## Neptunus

^ Yes, same here, and I'm using Firefox.


----------



## Drew

Did existing photos they suddenly stop appearing? Or was this with new photos?


----------

