Web Performance Tuning: Speeding up the Web
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Overview
As long as there's been a Web, people have been trying to make it faster. The maturation of the Web has meant more users, more data, more features, and consequently longer waits on the Web. Improved performance has become a critical factor in determining the usability of the Web in general and of individual sites in particular.
Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition is about getting the best possible performance from the Web. This book isn't just about tuning web server software; it's also about streamlining web content, getting optimal performance from a browser, tuning both client and server hardware, and maximizing the capacity of the network itself.
Web Performance Tuning hits the ground running, giving concrete advice for quick results โ the "blunt instruments" for improving crippled performance right away. The book then shifts gears to give a conceptual background of the principles of computing performance. The latter half of the book examines each element of a web transaction โ from client to network to server โ to find the weak links in the chain and show how to strengthen them.
In this second edition, the book has been significantly expanded to include:
- New chapters on Web site architecture, security, reliability, and their impact on performance
- Detailed discussion of scalability of Java on multi-processor servers
- Perl scripts for writing web performance spiders that handle logins, cookies, SSL, and more
- Detailed instructions on how to use Perl DBI and the open source program gnuplot to generate performance graphs on the fly
- Coverage of rstat, a Unix-based open source utility for gathering performance statistics remotely
In addition, the book includes many more examples and graphs of real-world performance problems and their solutions, and has been updated for Java 2.
This book is for anyone who has waited too long for a web page to display, or watched the servers they manage slow to a crawl. It's about making the Web more usable for everyone.
This handbook is for anyone responsible for a Web site, from the person running a personal site off a Linux PC at home up to large corporate site managers who wants to improve their performance right now.
Synopsis
This handbook is for anyone responsible for a Web site, from the person running a personal site off a Linux PC at home up to large corporate site managers who wants to improve their performance right now.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewThe Web may never be fast enough, but a whole lot's been learned in the past few years about building faster web sites. This book brings it all together, from optimizing content to tuning servers, scaling network infrastructure to building faster JavaServer Pages. This is in-depth stuff: detailed examples, measurement techniques, performance graphs, and dozens of solutions -- both "blunt instruments" and "scalpels."
Patrick Killelea begins with quick, preliminary recommendations for both the server and browser side: techniques that will make a significant difference in many, if not most, environments. Next, he reviews the planning and analysis techniques for identifying problems and acting proactively. You'll learn how to plan bandwidth, server, and memory capacity; automatically monitor each key performance parameter; test loads; and account for both reliability and security. Detailed case studies address several of the most widespread problems, including uncontrolled growth in database tables; logging delays caused by reverse DNS lookups; and database connection pool limitations.
Killelea then systematically reviews every link in the chain of Web performance: architecture, browsers, client and server operating systems and hardware; network connections; TCP/IP configuration; server applications; CGI; content; and much more. Killelea doesn't mince words: Java, he says, will never be adequate on the client side, but there are a raft of techniques for improving its performance on the server side (profiling, JITs, static compilation; adjusting runtime options). Whatever your role in maximizing web performance, whatever your application, you'll find this book indispensable. (Bill Camarda)
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jerseyยbased marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummiesยฎ, Second Edition.