Web Performance Tuning

Other Books and Resources

Books

In reading this book, you’ll find that I frequently refer to other books that explain concepts more completely than I can (at least, not without making this book twice its size). The following is a brief listing of the books that I recommend:

Albitz, Paul and Cricket Liu, DNS and Bind (O’Reilly & Associates, 1997).

Ballew, Scott, Managing IP Networks with Cisco Routers (O’Reilly & Associates, 1997).

Blake, Russ, Optimizing Windows NT (Microsoft Press, out of print).

Brooks, Fredrick P., Jr., The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley, 1995).

Chapman, Brent and Elizabeth Zwicky, Building Internet Firewalls (O’Reilly & Associates, 1995).

Cockcroft, Adrian and Richard Pettit, Sun Performance and Tuning (Prentice Hall, 1998). Everything about tuning Solaris and Sun hardware. The new edition includes Java and web tuning.

Dowd, Kevin, Getting Connected (O’Reilly & Associates, 1996).

Frisch, Æleen, Essential System Administration (O’Reilly & Associates, 1996).

Gancarz, Mike, The Unix Philosophy (Digital Press, 1996). Wonderful explanation of what makes Unix Unix.

Garfinkel, Simson, PGP: Pretty Good Privacy (O’Reilly & Associates, 1995).

Gray, Jim, The Benchmark Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems (Morgan Kauffman Publishers, 1993).

Gundavaram, Shishir, CGI Programming on the World Wide Web (O’Reilly & Associates, 1996).

Gurry, Mark and Peter Corrigan, Oracle Performance Tuning (O’Reilly & Associates, 1996).

Harold, Elliotte Rusty, Java Network Programming (O’Reilly & Associates, 1997).

Laurie, Ben and Peter Laurie, Apache: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates, 1997).

Libes, Don, Exploring Expect (O’Reilly & Associates, 1994).

Loukides, Mike, System Performance Tuning (O’Reilly & Associates, 1991). The standard text on Unix system performance.

Nassar, Daniel J., Ethernet and Token Ring Optimization (M&T Books, out of print). The accumulated experience of a network tuner. Includes TCP/IP tips.

Orfali, Robert and Dan Harkey, Client Server Programming with Java and CORBA (John Wiley & Sons, 1998).

Partridge, Craig, Gigabit Networking (Addison Wesley, 1994).

Stern, Hal, Managing NFS and NIS (O’Reilly & Associates, 1991).

Stevens, Richard, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment (Addison Wesley, 1993); and TCP/IP Illustrated, Volumes 1 and 2 (Addison Wesley, 1994).

Tannenbaum, Andrew S., Computer Networks (Prentice Hall, 1996). The canonical networking book.

Ware, Scott, Michael Tracy, Louis Slothouber, and Robert Barker, Professional Web Site Optimization (Wrox Press, Inc., 1997).

Wall, Larry, Tom Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz, Programming Perl (O’Reilly & Associates, 1996).

Wong, Brian L., Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers (Prentice Hall, 1997). See especially Chapter 4 on configuring web services.

Wong, Clinton, Web Client Programming with Perl (O’Reilly & Associates, 1997).

Web Sites with Performance Information

http://help.netscape.com/kb/server/971211-7.html

The Netscape tuning page included in this book.

http://www.apache.org

The Apache home page. See especially http://www.apache.org/docs/misc/perf.html.

http://www.apacheweek.com/tips/

Tips for running Apache.

http://louvx.biap.com/webperformance/

Lou Slothuber’s web performance page.

http://www.cam.org/~agena/computer.html

Extensive PC hardware performance site.

http://www.cmg.org/

The Computer Measurement Group’s home page.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jch/java/optimization.html

Jonathan Hardwick’s Java optimization page.

http://www.sysopt.com/

Very popular page packed with information on optimizing PCs.

http://www.1computers.com/f/ftomhardware.html

Tom’s Hardware Guide. Rightly famous for PC hardware information.

http://www.nlanr.net/Papers/data-inet97.html

Excellent review of the state of performance measurement of the Internet.

http://www.rational.com/

Includes some papers on application performance tuning.

http://www.sun.com/workshop/java/wp-javaio/ , http://www.sun.com/solaris/java/wp-java/

Information about running Java quickly on Solaris 2.6.

http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-03-1996/swol-03-perf.html

Good web server performance article.

http://www.sgi.com/Technology/web/

SGI’s Web Performance Tuning Guide.

http://www.techweb.com/speed/

Lots of tuning tips, but only for Windows platforms.

http://www.cerberus-sys.com/~belleisl/mtu_mss_rwin.html

The definitive site for Winsock tuning.

http://www.w3.org/

Has the RFCs on which the web is based.

http://www.sun.com/javastation/whitepapers/serversizingguide/

How big should your JavaStation™ server be?

http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Hardware/Benchmarks

A set of links to other benchmark and tuning sites.

Newsgroups with Web Performance Content

comp.benchmarks

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

comp.infosystems.www.misc

comp.unix.solaris