The third and final article in my SearchSoftwareQuality.com Testing for Performance series posted. The complete series can be found here:Testing for performance, part 1: Assess the problem spaceTesting for performance, part 2: Build out the test assetsTesting for performance, part 3: Provide information

You can use this little Python function to see what type of web server a site is running.  All it does is send an HTTP request to the host and reads the 'server' header in the response.

 import httplib def get_server_type(host): conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host)
conn.request('GET', '/') resp = conn.getresponse() return resp.getheader('server')
print get_server_type('www.pylot.org') print get_server_type('www.techcrunch.com') 

Output:

Its a sign of the times that no self-respecting source-level library vendor ships without tests. Read more on Brad Abrams' blog.