Web Performance Tuning

How This Book Is Organized

The first part of this book goes over topics of general interest to anyone running a web site, including quick and simple performance boosts, estimating what hardware and software you need for a given load and level of performance, common measures of web site performance, case studies of some web sites, and principles of performance tuning.

Figure 1. The chain of events

The structure of the second part of book is modeled on what actually happens when the user of a web browser requests an HTML page from a web server. We’ll follow an HTML request from client to network to server to CGI to database (see Figure P-1). We’ll also cover what happens when a Java applet is downloaded from the server and started in the browser. From the browser’s point of view, after the request is sent, the answer magically appears on the network. From the network’s point of view, the answer magically appears at the connection to the server, and so on. We’ll trace the process back one stage at a time to point out performance issues along the way and to eliminate the unknown. We’ll also give tips for finding out which side of each interface is slower so that you can figure out where the bottleneck is and how to bring the performance of that section into line with the rest of your web site.

Part I

Chapter 1 describes crude but often effective measures to increase your site’s performance ...