Perform or Die

There's no excuse these days for crappy web performance. The low hanging fruit is just too low. It is trivial to make a web site that loads fast for users. Do it. If you don't know how, you should come to my Web Performance Boot Camp tutorial at ApacheCon. Make you site fast — no excuses.

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Call to action! Make the web a faster place! Here's a short article on how I spent 45 minutes to improve user-perceived performance on our website. This is the low-hanging fruit of front-end web performance optimizations. Most of you who read my blog are scalability or performance nuts. Most of you also cast the majority of your focus (like me) on the back-end infrastructure problems. Don't ignore the front-end when just a tiny bit of work can remove a huge amount of suck.

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In perhaps a new trend, I’m blogging from 39011 feet (or so says the seatback in front of me). I’m traveling back home to the east coast from San Jose, CA where I attended (and spoke) at this year’s O’Reilly Velocity Conference. I participated (and blogged) about the Velocity Summit in which I’ve participated for the past two years. The summit is the unconference preceding the real conference that help the organizers digest current hot topics and better define the conference track for the actual conference.

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So, I do a lot on the scalability front. I spend a lot of time reviewing people’s architectures and helping them understand how things can change to make sure that their data infrastructure can survive substantial growth. Scalability isn’t a new concept, but before 10 years ago, there was so much concentration on performance that people that specialized in the area of scalability had to make a point. What was that point?

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We've been doing a lot of PostgreSQL work lately and we have one largish system (terabytes) that runs on top of Apple XServe RAIDs. While people argue that SATA is getting better, let it be understood that Fibre channel SCSI drives rule. The difference between carrier class storage and "enterprise" (a.k.a. commodity) is pretty tremendous. While this system will eventually make good use of the XServer RAIDs and long-term storage containers for write-once read-many data tables (archives), the "

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Author's picture

Theo Schlossnagle

Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Operations. read more

CEO - Circonus

Maryland, USA