PUBLIC MARKS with tags web & performance

As a consultant, I deal with companies of all sizes. From new startups all the way up to large conglomerates. And I am constantly amazed at the old-world view to application scalability and performance.

Opsview is enterprise network and application monitoring software designed for scalability, flexibility and ease of use. Opsview has been in development since 2003 and is released under the GNU GPL license. Current version is 2.12. Opsview is a fully integrated monitoring tool that incorporates popular Open Source software including Nagios, Net-SNMP and RRDtool. The Catalyst web framework provides an extensible monitoring and configuration user interface. Opsview software is supported on Linux (Debian, CentOS, RHEL and Ubuntu) and Solaris 10. It will monitor all common operating systems including Windows. Opsview extends the capabilities of Nagios in the following ways: * Distributed monitoring with high availability and fail-over * Much improved SNMP support with trap processing with rules engine * API supporting automation of Opsview configuration * Data warehouse for storage of historical performance and event data * Opsview Reports customisable reporting * Powerful configuration and management UI * Extended monitoring UI * Extensible architecture based on Catalyst Web Framework and Altinity middleware software

Quand on pense à l’optimisation du temps de chargement d’un site, on pense généralement à améliorer le temps de génération des pages sur le serveur web. Hors, ce temps ne représente que 10 à 20% du temps de rendu de la page. Il existe en revanche des techniques directement applicables ayant un réel impact sur les performances. C’est pour expliquer ces différentes techniques que j’ai décidé de participer pour la troisième fois en tant que conférencier aux Intellicore Tech Talks. Comme je l’annonçais il y a quelques jours, j’ai fait cette présentation avec Nicolas Chevallier, ingénieur Polytech’Nice-Sophia, consultant Astek et créateur de Allogarage.fr.

Optimisation de la bande passante avec l'utilisation des sprites.

Article très intéressant sur le type d'image à utiliser pour un site web ainsi que les différentes optimisations possibles pour png.

Yaws is a HTTP high perfomance 1.1 webserver particularly well suited for dynamic-content webapplications, written in Erlang.

The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories.

premature optimization is the root of all evil

Caching is a great example of the ubiquitous time-space tradeoff in programming. You can save time by using space to store results. Fewer downloads means a faster, happier site.

Caching is the temporary storage of frequently accessed data in higher speed media (typically SRAM or RAM) for more efficient retrieval. Web caching stores frequently used objects closer to the client through browser, proxy, or server caches. By storing "fresh" objects closer to your users, you avoid round trips to the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption, server load, and most importantly, latency. This article shows how to configure your Apache server for more efficient caching to save bandwidth and improve performance. Caching is not just for static sites, even dynamic sites can benefit from caching. Graphics and multimedia typically don't change as frequently as (X)HTML files. Graphics that seldom change like logos, headers, and navigation can be given longer expiration times while resources that change more frequently like XHTML and XML files can be given shorter expiration times. By designing your site with caching in mind, you can target different classes of resources to give them different expiration times with only a few lines of code.

Enquisite produces increasingly granular reports on your website's activity in search engines. Working in conjunction with other web analytic tools, Enquisite provides information and metrics webmasters can't get anywhere else. Easy to read with flexible parameters and mapping, Enquisite search engine metrics give you the edge in the organic and PPC search markets. * = search engine ranking analysis and reports Search Engine Ranking Reports Graphic reporting on search traffic and ranking data down to city and zip/postal code * Know Your Customers' Queries Know Your Customers Keyword and traffic analysis to explain why and how site visitors access your business

This article shows 2 awesome ways to implement caching on your website using Apache .htaccess (httpd.conf) files on the Apache Web Server. Both methods are extremely simple to set up and will dramatically speed up your site!

You can benchmark Apache, IIS and other web server with apache benchmarking tool called ab. Recently I was asked to performance benchmarks for different web servers. It is true that benchmarking a web server is not an easy task. From how to benchmark a web server, “First, benchmarking a web server is not an easy thing. To benchmark a web server the time it will take to give a page is not important: you don’t care if a user can have his page in 0.1 ms or in 0.05 ms as nobody can have such delays on the Internet.

Opening a database connection is a resource intensive and time consuming operation. Connection pooling increases the performance of Web applications by reusing active database connections instead of creating a new connection with every request. Connection pool manager maintains a pool of open database connections. When a new connection requests come in, the pool manager checks if the pool contains any unused connections and returns one if available. If all connections currently in the pool are busy and the maximum pool size has not been reached, the new connection is created and added to the pool. When the pool reaches its maximum size all new connection requests are being queued up until a connection in the pool becomes available or the connection attempt times out.