New Book: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In his new book Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.

Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:

• JavaScript - Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.


• Network - Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.


• Browser - Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.

About the Author

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. He is also co-chair of Velocity 2008, the first web performance conference sponsored by O'Reilly. He frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

Some Questions from a newbie

Hello highscalability world. I just discovered this site yesterday in a search for a scalability resource and was very pleased to find such useful information. I have some questions regarding distributed caching that I was hoping the scalability intelligentsia trafficking this forum could answer. I apologize for my lack of technical knowledge; I'm hoping this site will increase said knowledge! Feel free to answer all or as much as you want. Thank you in advance for your responses and thank you for a great resource! 1.) What are the standard benchmarks used to measure the performance of memcached or mySQL/memcached working together (from web 2.0 companies etc)? 2.) The little research I've conducted on this site suggests that most web 2.0 companies use a combination of mySQL and a hacked memcached (and potentially sharding). Does anyone know if any of these companies use an enterprise vendor for their distributed caching layer? (At this point in time I've only heard of Jive software using Coherence). 3.) In terms of a web 2.0 oriented startup, what are the database/distributed caching requirements typically needed to get off the ground and grow at a fairly rapid pace? 4.) Given the major players in the web 2.0 industry (facebook, twitter, myspace, PoF, Flickr etc, I'm ignoring google/amazon here because they have a proprietary caching layer) what is the most common, scalable back-end setup (mySQL/memcached/sharding etc)? What are its limitations/problems? What features does said setup lack that it really needs? Thank you so much for your insight!

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Books: Web 2.0 Architectures and Cloud Application Architectures

I am excited about the upcoming release of two books on Web 2.0 and Cloud Application Architectures by O'Reilly. Web 2.0 Architectures (estimated release in May 2009) What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know Using several high-profile Web 2.0 companies as examples, authors Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor have distilled the core patterns of Web 2.0 coupled with an abstract model and reference architecture. The result is a base of knowledge that developers, business people, futurists, and entrepreneurs can understand and use as a source of ideas and inspiration. Featured architectures include Google, Flickr, BitTorrent, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Cloud Application Architectures (estimated release in April 2009) Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud This book by George Reese offers tested techniques for creating web applications on cloud computing infrastructures and for migrating existing systems to these environments. Specifically, you'll learn about the programming and system administration necessary for supporting transactional web applications in the cloud -- mission-critical activities that include orders and payments to support customers. The second book is available online at O'Reilly as a Rough Cuts Version so you might already had a chance to check it out. If so, do you like it?

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Web Consolidation on the Sun Fire T1000 using Solaris Containers

Reducing the costs of IT infrastructure and improving the manageability and efficiency of web services pose significant challenges for many organizations in today's economic climate. Recent studies describe the challenges IT managers face administering the proliferation of x86-based servers used to run web services applications. Those reports reveal that using large number of x86-based systems can increase space and power consumption, as well as cost and asset management overhead. In addition, many of these x86-based systems run a mixture of operating system and application software leading to increased management complexity and potential security concerns. Faced with these challenges, many organizations are attracted by the idea of consolidating web and application services from multiple x86-based servers to a smaller number of high-performance servers. This approach strives to help simplify management, improve performance, and increase the efficiency of delivering web services. The combined capabilities of the Sun Fire T1000 server and Solaris Containers technology in particular offer significant promise as a web-tier consolidation platform. The Sun Fire T1000 server offers high aggregate throughput performance in a small, power-efficient footprint. Solaris containers provide a complete, isolated, and secure runtime environment for applications, enabling multiple web servers to run safely and efficiently on the same platform. This paper explores the configuration and testing of the Sun Fire T1000 server as a web-tier consolidation platform. It discusses methodologies used to consolidate multiple web servers onto a single Sun Fire T1000 server, and explains the steps used to configure the Solaris Containers. In addition, to determine the effectiveness of this approach, testing was performed to evaluate the consolidated Sun Fire T1000 system against a baseline configuration of current Xeon servers, a popular choice as web server platform.

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Sun's High-Performance and Reliable Web Proxy Solution

As individuals and businesses depend on the Web more than ever to conduct business, rapid and reliable content retrieval is critical. Reducing wait time improves productivity and increases user satisfaction. Web proxy technology has emerged as an effective solution to improve performance, help ensure content availability and enhance network security by caching and filtering Web content. The combination of Sun SPARC Enterprise servers with CoolThreads technology and the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server software provides a compelling foundation for a robust Web proxy solution. Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers include the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, offering six or eight cores with four threads per core. The Sun Java System Web Proxy Server software is highly threaded and takes advantage of the large number of threads supported by Sun UltraSPARC T1 processors with CoolThreads technology. Together, these products provide a highly scalable solution that accommodates a large number of requests, addresses peak loads, and provides future headroom for growth. This document explores the use of a Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 server and the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server software as a replacement for an existing Web proxy implementation that used the SQUID Web proxy server software deployed on x86 servers.

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Breakthrough Web-Tier Solutions with Record-Breaking Performance

With the explosive growth of the Internet, increasing complexity of user requirements, and wide choice of hardware, operating systems, and middleware, IT executives are facing new challenges in their application infrastructures. Rapid expansion of the application tier has resulted in significant cost and complexity, and many organizations are simply running out of datacenter space, power, and cooling.

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MySQL Database Scale-out and Replication for High Growth Businesses

It is widely recognized that MySQL is the most popular database software in the world. Since its inception in 1995, there have been 11 million product installations around the world in a wide variety of markets. There are more installations of MySQL in use today than any other database architecture. From startup companies hoping to be the next Web2.0 poster child to large global enterprises, the MySQL database architecture has proven to be flexible, extendable, scalable, and more than capable of filling high-capacity database roles in very different venues.

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An Open Source Web Solution - Lighttpd Web Server and Chip Multithreading Technology

With more users interacting, working, purchasing, and communicating over the network than ever before, Web 2.0 infrastructure is taking center stage in many organizations. Demand is rising, and companies are looking for ways to tackle the performance and scalability needs placed on Web infrastructure without raising IT operational expenses. Today companies are turning to efficient, high-performance, open source solutions as a way to decrease acquisition, licensing, and other ongoing costs and stay within budget constraints.

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Olio Web2.0 Toolkit - Evaluate Web Technologies and Tools

How do you evaluate and decide which web technologies (and there are myriads out there) to use for your new web application, which one potentially gives you the best performance, which one will likely give you the shortest time-to-market? The Apache incubator project Olio might help. Olio is a is an open source web 2.0 toolkit to help evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of web technologies. Olio defines an example web2.0 application (an events site somewhat like yahoo.com/upcoming) and provides three initial implementations : PHP, Java EE and RubyOnRails (ROR). The toolkit also defines ways to drive load against the application in order to measure performance. Apache Olio could be used to

• Understand how to use various web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
• Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
• Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
• Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
• Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

Olio started it's life as the web2.0kit developed by Sun Microsystems in colloboration with U.C. Berkeley RAD Lab and was presented on Velocity2008.

• Sun is using Olio to create deployment, reference architecture and performance tuning guides for their customers such as: An Open Source Web Solution - Lighttpd Web Server and Chip Multithreading Technology
• U.C. Berkeley is using Olio in a variety of research projects, the first of which is Cloudstone.
• A few web2.0 companies are using Olio as a training tool to teach their new developers PHP and Rails.

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Database War Stories #3: Flickr

[Tim O'Reilly] Continuing my series of queries about how "Web 2.0" companies used databases, I asked Cal Henderson of Flickr to tell me "how the folksonomy model intersects with the traditional database. How do you manage a tag cloud?"

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