Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop

Many people in the Apache Hadoop community have asked Yahoo! to publish the version of Apache Hadoop they test and deploy across their large Hadoop clusters. As a service to the Hadoop community, Yahoo is releasing the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop -- a source code distribution that is based entirely on code found in the Apache Hadoop project.

This source distribution includes code patches that they have added to improve the stability and performance of their clusters. In all cases, these patches have already been contributed back to Apache, but they may not yet be available in an Apache release of Hadoop.

Read more and get the Hadoop distribution from Yahoo

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!.

Facebook, Hadoop, and Hive

Facebook has the second largest installation of Hadoop (a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data), Yahoo being the first.

Learn how they do it and what are the challenges on DBMS2 blog, which is a blog for people who care about database and analytic technologies.

Paper: Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing

Yahoo has developed a new language called Pig Latin that fit in a sweet spot between high-level declarative querying in the spirit of SQL, and low-level, procedural programming `a la map-reduce and combines best of both worlds. The accompanying system, Pig, is fully implemented, and compiles Pig Latin into physical plans that are executed over Hadoop, an open-source, map-reduce implementation. Pig has just graduated from the Apache Incubator and joined Hadoop as a subproject. The paper has a few examples of how engineers at Yahoo! are using Pig to dramatically reduce the time required for the development and execution of their data analysis tasks, compared to using Hadoop directly. References: Apache Pig Wiki

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Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

The Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. They focus on the front-end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. This google tech talk features these best practices and demonstrate YSlow. Relevant links: 14 Rules for Exceptional Web Performance: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ Check out the book for details: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers

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Making the case for PHP at Yahoo! (Oct 2002)

This presentation by Michael Radwin describes why Yahoo! had standardized on PHP going forward. It describes how after reviewing all the web technologies including their own internal ones, PHP was choosen. It shows that not only technical reasons , but also business and development processes were taken into account.

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