Performance Tuning for BINSniper 3

The article describes performance tuning for the eBay website for VieBuy and BINSniper 3.0 or higher.

 

How this varies from the BINSniper 2.x recommendations:

BINSniper 3.x is more efficient on the network and performs better over 3G, WiFi and satellite connections too. There are no settings that improve item delivery speed.

The following Firefox setting can be used to improve image and script loading time on fast network connection. This primary impacts load time of the eBay pages.

Enter about:config into the Firefox address bar (where you type URLs). A settings list should appear. You may receive a warning first. If you do, accept the warning screen.

Enter the following into the search box:

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

Warning: This setting affects all websites. Increasing this setting too much may result in excessive demands being place on servers and you being banned.  10 is a reasonable maximum.

 

Double click to adjust the setting. Increase it to 10.

 

If this setting does not exist, right click the blank area of the screen and select New->Integer. Paste the name into the preference box, click OK, and enter 10 for the value.

Increasing this setting can improve image and script loading time on eBay.  Image loading may be improved on BINSniper and VieBuy websites when many items are displayed. This setting has no effect on item delivery speed.

 

Network Pipelining

Firefox has settings to enable network pipelining that are widely recommended as cure-alls. While these may improve performance in some cases, they are not likely to improve BINSniper performance for most users. Broadband users are unlikely to see any improvements at all in any circumstances by modifying the Firefox settings. Pipelining may also introduce some security risks. See this article at sys-con for more information on these issues. We do not recommend pipelining to improve BINSniper performance.

 

Use more specific searches for better speed and ease of use

For best performance, you should make your searches as tight as possible. Very broad searches will result in the entire item list being replaced with each update. More specific searches will yield fewer results and make it easier to work with the lists. You can use the streamer mode to separate lists on the screen, one for each search.

Limiting the number of searches improves display time on your browser. But more importantly it allows you to focus only on items that you would actually buy.

For example, if you have the following searches:

ipod nano blue case
ipod shuffle blue case

You could replace these with:

ipod blue case

The nano and shuffle searches would be included, as well as other ipod models.

Or you can use the OR syntax to limit the results to nano and shuffle only:

ipod blue case (nano, shuffle)

which means:   items containing “ipod” and “blue” and “case” and either “nano” or “shuffle”

 

Pale Moon

Pale Moon is a performance optimized version of Firefox for Windows. Pale Moon is (or was) derived from Firefox code, and has some hardware restrictions. It is not supported by Mozilla. Some BINSniper users are running Pale Moon, but we cannot provide support for it. The current release does not appear to implement the necessary features of Gecko 29+ required by BINSniper. We have not tested any version for performance or compatibility.

 

 

VieBuy 3.02 – Now delivers ending auctions

VieBuy 3.02 has now gone live

What’s new:

Auctions

The items feeds now include auctions that are ending in a few minutes. By default, auctions are enabled and only auctions with bids are shown. You can show all auctions, show only auctions with bids, or disable auctions on the Settings page. You should use the Arrival Sort option with auctions for best results.

Auctions are identified in the lists by a gavel icon next to the time and the text “Auction:” in the item title

 

Try it out now at: VieBuy.com

Docs are here: http://auctionbucks.com/viebuy

 

Disable BIN Filtering in BINSniper

We are recommending that everyone disable the BIN Filtering option in BINSniper.  This option is interacting with the new eBay process of batching items and may be preventing new items from being displayed.

As we previously posted, eBay is now batching items and publishing them on a delay that ranges from 0-15 minutes. Items are published to the feeds and the website at the same time. If your BIN filter is set below the delay time, the items won’t appear.

You should disable the feature or set it to at least 20 minutes.

 

The option will be removed in BINSniper 3.0  (coming very soon).

 

VieBuy 3.0 Now Available

We’re happy to announce the new VieBuy 3.0 system.

Updates:
We will be monitoring the system and making adjustments. Please post any requests here.

The following adjustments have already been made:

  • Dec 8 – The 100 char limit on searches has been increased to 500 char.
  • Dec 9 – eBay DE categories added
  • Dec 9 – Support for extended characters added
  • Dec 9 – Generic searches for diacritics added – find “nuvi” or “nüvi” by searching for “nuvi”
  • Dec 23 – Improved bandwidth and client performance.

 

What’s new:

New Display formats

The display has been modified to be more compatible with various browsers and devices.

Tiled View shows item images and details.

Table View is similar to previous versions and displays only text rows.

Image Only View shows just  thumbnail image and the price and is color coded by listing age.

There are also automatic and manual sorting options to configure the display to order items by price, listing age, or arrival time.

 

Improved bandwidth usage and consolidated data feeds

Items from multiple feeds are now delivered to your browser as they arrive. You no longer need to choose RSS or Data Feeds.

In previous versions, to do multiple searches you had to open multiple browser windows. Each window fetched items separately from eBay and bandwidth usage would scale accordingly.  The new system is designed to allow multiple searches to run at the same time with no increase in bandwidth when the program is idle. You only receive the items that match your primary search criteria.

Your browser will no longer continuously fetch and parse items for each search, but will wait for new items to be posted.  This is more mobile-friendly and should provide the fastest access to items from both feeds.

 

Support for multiple searches

You can now configure filters to monitor eBay categories on sites in the US, UK and Europe. Each filter can monitor a different channel. You can also setup multiple filters for a single channel. The results from all of your filters are merged into a single display.

 

Search by Channel

VieBuy 3.0 introduces channels which correspond to top level eBay categories on an eBay site. For instance “US – Antiques” will only contain items from the eBay.com site in the Antiques category its sub-categories . By focusing your searches on the types of items you want, you receive more targeted results.

 

New Search Features

You can now search using extended search syntax, including wildcards, boolean search and even exclude items by negative searches. Complete details are in the User’s Guide.

Here’s a simple example:      ipad -blue*

This finds items where the title contains “ipad” but does not contain any word starting with “blue”. So blue cases and bluetooth headsets would be excluded.

You can now search by item condition. Exclude new or used items, damaged items, etc.

Category number searches are still available. So you can further select item within a channel using the sub-category numbers.

Filter item by seller feedback score or percentage. This can be used to exclude inexperienced sellers, problem sellers, or power sellers.

Select items by country and/or postal code and only receive locally listed items. This is a good way to avoid duty charges.

You can select items by seller ID, both to include or exclude.

 

Global Seller Exclude List

In the Settings tab, there’s a global seller exclude list that allows you to exclude specific sellers from your results without having to enter them on every filter. Think of this as a permanent block.

 

Try it out now at: VieBuy.com

The User’s Guide is here: http://auctionbucks.com/viebuy

BuyVie (UK version) users are now redirected to VieBuy.com. The new system can support UK users and the bandwidth improvements should result in a faster experience.

 

eBay Feed Changes

Data Feeds
eBay recently migrated their data feeds to a new system and severely reduced the speed at which items are added. They appear to be batching items, so some items will be very new while other with be minutes old when they hit the feed.

According to eBay, their websites will use the same data feed source, so items should appear in BINSNiper and VieBuy at the same speed as they do on the website.

In testing we find that items may arrive around 10-12 minutes after being listed, but will appear on the website at the same time. This also means that items will tend to arrive in groups rather than singly.

In practical terms, the new changes to the eBay servers mean that you will typically see items that started 0-15 minutes ago appear in the list with the majority being either less than two minutes old or around 10 minutes old. If eBay improves this batching behavior, the items will appear earlier in your results.

 

RSS Feeds
RSS speed is not yet affected by the data feed changes. We have also observed that RSS Feeds are not complete. Many items are never delivered via RSS but then later delivered by the Data Feeds.  The RSS feeds are also now delivering some items that are 12 hours old which should not be included.

 

Updates to deal with this

VieBuy 3.0 addresses these issues and filters out outdated items.

BINSniper 2.X is unaffected by the RSS issues, since it doesn’t use RSS, but is experiencing delays due to the data feed changes. BINSniper 3.0 now under final development will use our new data feed technology and should correct these issues and bring order to the galaxy.

 

The Future

eBay has made at least one public statement indicating that the they plan to do away with RSS feeds entirely. This may not end up being the case, since many webmaster tools such as WordPress plugins depend on the RSS feeds. But if RSS is eliminated, VieBuy will continue to deliver the data feed. Since everyone would then be on the same data source, timeliness should not be impacted.

 

Update  June 2015

Our stats indicate that RSS is no longer delivering items early.  We’ve stopped delivering RSS items to VieBuy and BINSniper 3+.  This allows faster processing of the data feeds.

 

 

BINSniper® 2.8 Available

New in BINSniper 2.8:

  • Added attention display on alert. This flashes the taskbar on windows (only when the browser is in the background). We suggest you add the add-on bar extension and drag the BINSniper icon to the add-on bar or the main toolbar. The icon will turn red when alerts occur.
  • Updated for Firefox 32

Tested thru Firefox v32, minimum Firefox v13

For the full features list see the BINSniper User Manual.

 

Download
Version 2.8 is available via Mozilla or directly from this site.
Thanks to a lightning fast review turnaround at Mozilla (under 10 minutes!), this add-on is already reviewed and should be available shortly thru the Firefox updater.