book

Professional Website Performance: Optimizing the Front-End and Back-End

by Peter Smith

November 2012

Intermediate to advanced

480 pages

14h 6m

English

Wrox

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A Brief History of Web BrowsersInside HTTPHow Browsers Download and Render ContentSummary
Understanding the Types of CachingControlling CachingDealing with Intermediate CachesCaching HTTP ResponsesDNS Caching and PrefetchingSummary
Who Uses CompressionUnderstanding How Compression WorksCompression in PHPSummary
JavaScript MinificationCSS MinificationHTML MinificationSummary
Understanding Image FormatsOptimizing ImagesCSS SpritesCSS PerformanceLooking ForwardSummary
JavaScript, JScript, and ECMAScriptThe Document Object ModelGetting the Most from JavaScriptAjaxSummary

ApacheLooking Beyond ApacheMultiserver Setups with Nginx and ApacheLoad BalancersSummary
Looking Inside MySQLUnderstanding the Storage EnginesTuning MySQLTuning MyISAMTuning InnoDBWorking with the Query CacheOptimizing SQLSummary
Using ReplicationPartitioningShardingComplementing MySQLAlternatives to MySQLSummary
NoSQL FlavorsmemcacheMongoDBOther NoSQL TechnologiesSummary
SSL CachingSSL Termination and EndpointsSending Intermediate CertificatesDetermining Key SizesSelecting Cipher SuitesInvesting in Hardware AccelerationThe Future of SSLSummary
Extensions and CompilingOpcode CachingCompiling PHPSessionsEfficient PHP ProgrammingProfiling with xhprofSummary
The Three-Way HandshakeTCP Performance
Understanding Mobile PlatformsResponsive ContentJavaScript and CSS CompatibilityCaching in Mobile Devices
The LZW FamilyHuffman EncodingCompression Implementations

Content preview from Professional Website Performance: Optimizing the Front-End and Back-End

Chapter 7 Working with Web Servers

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

Tuning Apache for optimal performance
Using Nginx for both static and dynamic content
Setting up load balancing across multiple servers using Nginx and HAProxy

For the majority of system administrators and web developers, Apache is the automatic choice for a web server. It’s (fairly) fast, powerful, widely used, and available precompiled for most operating systems. Apache is so popular in the Linux world that it’s easy to forget that alternatives exist. Yet, Apache is not perfect, and as web growth has accelerated (and as Ajax has changed the nature of some of this traffic), the need to serve huge numbers of requests has given birth to several lightweight web servers specifically designed with performance in mind.

This chapter examines performance considerations for Apache, before taking a look at the most prominent of the competitors that have emerged in the last decade. This chapter also discusses the challenges that can arise when moving away from Apache, and takes a brief look at caching, front-end proxies, and load-balanced server pools.

APACHE

The Apache HTTP Server is such an important part of the Internet’s history (and the history of Linux, for that matter, too, since Apache + Linux + x86 quickly became a viable alternative to commercial web servers running on UNIX mainframes in the 1990s). Because of that, this discussion assumes that you have at least a basic knowledge of Apache management and configuration, ...