Skip to Content
Web Performance Tuning
book

Web Performance Tuning

by Patrick Killelea
October 1998
Intermediate to advanced
374 pages
12h 6m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Web Performance Tuning

Hardware and Operating System Issues

The single biggest hardware issue affecting web server performance is RAM. A web server should never ever have to swap: swapping increases the latency of each request beyond a point that users consider fast enough. This causes users to hit Stop and reload, further increasing the load. You can, and should, control the MaxClients setting so that your server does not spawn so many children it starts swapping.

Beyond that, the rest is mundane: get a fast enough CPU, a fast enough network card, and fast enough disks, where “fast enough” is something that needs to be determined by experimentation.

Operating system choice is largely a matter of local concerns. But a general guideline is to always apply the latest vendor TCP/IP patches. HTTP serving completely breaks many of the assumptions built into Unix kernels up through 1994, and even 1995. Good choices include recent FreeBSD and Linux.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition

Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition

Patrick Killelea
Web performance basics

Web performance basics

Maximiliano Firtman

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565923790Catalog PageErrata