monitoring tools for production sites

[Adam Morris]

Me and my users have noticed that, for our production server, when clicking on the play button for videos that are more than around 100MB, there is a significant delay in the time for when it actually starts playing. For smaller files, it is near instantaneous. Obviously, I need a few monitoring tools to see what is going on. Could this group recommend a few? How would the pros go about debugging this? The stack I'm using is nginx + uwsgi. I'm sure Firebug is probably essential, too, but exactly what would I be looking for to debug this particular problem?

[Felix Schwarz]

quick shot: you have mp4 files hosted over http and a user must download the
whole video file before it starts playing. The reason is that the metadata is
at the end of the file instead of the beginning (technically "mdat atom is
before the moov atom").

One solution is 'qtfaststart.py' + 'qt-faststart' from ffmpeg.

In general: These client-side issues are best investigated with Firebug or the
Chrome/Safari Web Inspector (the latter is often even a bit better). Next step
could be a network sniffer (like wireshark).

fs