Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Internet) [Paperback]

Patrick Killelea (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 059600172X | ISBN-13: 978-0596001728 | Publication Date: March 2002 | Edition: Second Edition

As long as there's been a Web, people have been trying to make it faster. The maturation of the Web has meant more users, more data, more features, and consequently longer waits on the Web. Improved performance has become a critical factor in determining the usability of the Web in general and of individual sites in particular.

Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition is about getting the best possible performance from the Web. This book isn't just about tuning web server software; it's also about streamlining web content, getting optimal performance from a browser, tuning both client and server hardware, and maximizing the capacity of the network itself.

Web Performance Tuning hits the ground running, giving concrete advice for quick results -- the "blunt instruments" for improving crippled performance right away. The book then shifts gears to give a conceptual background of the principles of computing performance. The latter half of the book examines each element of a web transaction -- from client to network to server -- to find the weak links in the chain and show how to strengthen them.

In this second edition, the book has been significantly expanded to include:

• New chapters on Web site architecture, security, reliability, and their impact on performance
• Detailed discussion of scalability of Java on multi-processor servers
• Perl scripts for writing web performance spiders that handle logins, cookies, SSL, and more
• Detailed instructions on how to use Perl DBI and the open source program gnuplot to generate performance graphs on the fly
• Coverage of rstat, a Unix-based open source utility for gathering performance statistics remotely

In addition, the book includes many more examples and graphs of real-world performance problems and their solutions, and has been updated for Java 2.

This book is for anyone who has waited too long for a web page to display, or watched the servers they manage slow to a crawl. It's about making the Web more usable for everyone.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Whether you're administering a Web site, managing an intranet, or just browsing the Web, performance should be a chief concern. In Web Performance Tuning, author Patrick Killelea tackles this challenging topic with a methodical string of problems and possible solutions. This title is most beneficial for those maintaining Web sites but offers several browser-related tips and solid technical background for users of any level.

The first part of this book discusses the basic performance challenges for both the browser and server sides of the equation and advises on an overall approach for identifying and attacking performance bottlenecks. The author offers many important questions for you to keep in mind and some useful techniques for measuring Web performance. This section wraps up with a few case studies that exhibit common problems.

The meat of the book is an in-depth look at all of the aspects of Web performance. The author begins with the client browser and operating-system software, discusses network hardware and protocols, and finally addresses the complex nature of server configurations. He finishes with a discussion of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Java scripts and some quick coverage of tuning Web databases.

Throughout the book, Killelea addresses popular application software titles, but with an emphasis on Unix servers. While Web Performance Tuning is a helpful tool for tweaking your Web connections, it also serves as an excellent primer on the technical details of the Web. --Stephen Plain --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This book still scores highly on the sections which are general in their scope, particularly the new chapters which have been written for this edition. The more specific sections feel dates, and are likely to further age extremely quickly. Overall the book is still a good source for advice on identifying performance bottlenecks and suggesting ways to tune the infrastructure to eliminate them." - Joel Smith, News@UKUUG, October 2002

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Second Edition edition (March 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059600172X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596001728
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,531,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic O'Reilly marred by thin dynamic web coverage, April 3, 2003

By 

Chia-heng Yao "milesyao" (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Internet) (Paperback)

Pragmatic and opinionated in the best of old-time O'Reilly style, this book is a colorful guided tour by an old-hand.

The thing is, if you need this book, your website is probably a high-traffic professional/commercial site. And in these days this means (1) dynamic content, (2) database, (3) a content-management/templating system, (4) user identity tracking. Perhaps even interface to legacy client/server systems. Unfortunately, this book goes only as far as CGI, Java, and general DB issues. Messaging middleware is briefly considered. Distributed OO (CORBA, EJB) is discussed and dismissed (a luxury in real world). No coverage of other popular dynamic web technologies (e.g. ASP, ColdFusion) or content-management systems. In particular, a serious discussion of trade-offs between performance and content/workflow manageability would ground the whole discussion in real life.

And the architecture chapter, while very insightful, is simply too thin. After all it is much better and easier to plan for performance from the start, then to try tweaking an existing system. The chapter discusses architectures of varying complexity - <i>without including a single diagram!</i> Complete case studies along the line of the mod_perl white paper .... would be invaluable - perhaps broken down by type (e.g. news/portal/B2C) where unique usage patterns will drive unique architecture and optimization.

Despite the tilt towards monitoring and diagnosis, this is still a very valuable book in an under-served but important area. Generous references enable the reader to explore individual topics further.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding technical analysis, but often too UNIX-centric, November 9, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Web Performance Tuning: Speeding Up the Web (O'Reilly Nutshell) (Paperback)

"Web Performance Tuning" delivers a comprehensive overview of the factors that affect Web performance and what you can do about them. While the book presents a few tips for faster browsing, the majority of the text is devoted to Web server tuning. The explanations are clear and informative, and will let Webmasters get to work right away, assuming, unfortunately, that their servers are running either Solaris or Linux. The author provides virtually no specific coverage of other UNIXes, or of Windows NT or Mac OS server platforms; Microsoft IIS is discussed only once in the entire 350-page book. While the book's general concepts and explanations will be useful to most Webmasters, many of the specific details the author presents do not translate well to non-UNIX platforms.

The book's first section, Preliminary Considerations, is an outstanding analysis of the relationships between bandwidth, latency, server memory, CPU speed, traffic levels, user expectations and cost. Along the way, the author highlights the extreme gap between real-world performance requirements and the artificial numbers generated by benchmark tools. He notes that a full T1 line can only carry 33 hits per second (at 4K each), and that a million hits per day translates into a peak server load of only about 25-30 hits per second. These real-world numbers are then contrasted with the hundreds or thousands of hits per second usually quoted by vendors, which the author refers to as "benchmarketing." Refreshingly, the author then describes how to create practical benchmark scenarios for your own Web servers, and how to use them effectively.

The second section, Tuning In Depth, briefly discusses Web client tuning, and then addresses the details of network, Web server, and CGI tuning. The author explains each issue, makes specific recommendations, and supports them with relevant facts and calculations. Each chapter ends with a concise "key recommendations" section, which condenses the chapter into a few memorable one-liners - a great feature for the busy Webmaster. The recommendations run from very general guidelines to very specific suggestions, such as "Use separate disks for log writing and content reading." While some of the discussion applies only to UNIX servers, most of the recommendations apply equally well to other platforms.

Finally, the book includes Appendixes with specific tuning tips for Netscape Enterprise Server, Apache, and Solaris' 2.x TCP/IP Stack. Although much of the same material is available on the Web (with updates), the printed reference and the author's comments are valuable resources to have handy if you use these products.

This book should be considered required reading for all present and future Webmasters; it is the most clear and direct discussion of real-world Web server performance published to date. However, this book's UNIX-centric view skips over some important issues facing today's Webmasters, such as Web database performance and the tuning of non-UNIX Web servers. The book does not mention FileMaker or Access, or middleware products like Tango, Lasso, or Cold Fusion. And while the tuning guidelines will be helpful to most Webmasters, the book does not provide any specifics for optimizing Microsoft IIS or WebSTAR. It is a bit surprising to see all of these popular packages omitted from this very recent book. Ultimately though, every Webmaster who reads this book will learn new ways to improve server performance and many of them will enjoy it as well.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise, complete, and credible, May 10, 2000

By 

Peter L. Lutz (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Web Performance Tuning: Speeding Up the Web (O'Reilly Nutshell) (Paperback)

This book is both a great reference and superb introductory guide to the essentials of tuning a web site. All the elements are covered, with chapters on client hardware, network protocols, and server software to name a few. How each element affects performance is discussed along with a description of tools to monitor and tune performance. The chapter on content should be required reading for anyone putting together HTML pages no matter how large their site. The prose is readable and each chapter is nicely summarized with several concise "Key Recommendations". Unless you are building your own web site from scratch, you won't have to know everything in this book, but you may want to anyway, if for no other reason than to know who to blame when your web site is not performing well.

As the web is changing every day some of the information is dated, especially the chapters on running server side applications. The chapter on CGI is decent, but the chapters on database and Java tuning are cursory and best covered by books dedicated to those subjects. There is nothing on active server pages. Also a chapter on balancing security versus performance would have been welcome, and hopefully will be included in a second edition.

There is definitely more about UNIX than NT in the book. This doesn't matter when doing hardware and network tuning and Microsoft certainly does not help with their license restriction on the publication of IIS benchmarks. The reality is that there are more web servers running UNIX or Linux variants than NT. However, with the rapid proliferation of active server pages more should be included on NT in a future edition.

Getting usable information on performance tuning is sometimes very difficult. Such information is usually gleaned sparingly from Usenet groups or expensively from consultants. "Web Performance Tuning" is a solid guide with a lot of information condensed and indexed that would be difficult to find elsewhere. It is definitely remaining on the easy to reach side of my bookcase.