Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

In general a very good high level look at web server tuning as well as network tuning. We haven't had any good references on this until now.

The book isn't particularly UNIX centric, just slanted towards higher performance servers running on high availabilty UNIX platforms. NT still doesn't fit the bill and the author isn't afraid to state it. It might have been nice if the author had gone into more depth on clustering, but just the sections on specific tuning for CGI and Java make this book worth the purchase price. Especially nice is the author's stress on portable solutions over proprietary lock in solutions. Since the technology in the web arena is likely to change radically in just the next few years it hardly makes sense sacrifice portability for a slight speed increase.

In response to the review below stating that the book was too Unix-centric, you have to understand that O`Reilly is a publisher that specializes in Unix, Linux, and open-source. They do publish books on vendor specific Unixes and even NT, however they are in the minority and shouldn't be expected to be covered in their general networking books.

If you are a Unix webmaster, I suggest this book. If you are an IIS webmaster, you may wish to look elsewhere.

Well, I personally think that the book is too broad. It tries to conver everything which should be left to separate books. I was expecting to get good details on tuning web servers / capacity planning etc but instead just re-read stuff that is in other books. The chapter on capacity planning is decent as well as the appendicies. However these should have been the core of the book. If you are a beginner to the Internet and want to know general performance stuff get it. If you are more of a veteren don't buy it.

While this book may be criticized for being too general and not always offering direct recipes and numeric examples, I think this is one of its strengths. Killelea discusses lots of topics and his explanations of the different layers and specific components that contribute to overall performance is a breath of fresh air. He (and Linda) have an elegant, engaging style that makes this book a pleasure to read. It is not as much a reference book on tuning the web, as it is a great explanation of how things work, how they interact, how they affect performance, and what to do to improve that performance. Great!

Here are a whole bunch of general recommendations for tuning, however nothing specific, a lot of the general stuff they teach you in your basic CS curriculum. CPU registers are faster than memory, SCSI is faster than disk, etc. There is some useful stuff on network performance tuning. Also, a few terrible typos in the book that really should have been caught. The numbers also seem out of date for a book published in Oct 98 (100Mhz PC processors being top of the line in this book)

Not much material here on optimizing NT or NT hardware, which would be nice.

If you've never optimized a system, the info here might be useful, otherwise most of it isn't new.

This is one book with wide appeal because it is useful to anyone that uses the Internet; so if you are reading this review - chances are very good that you will find this book of some use. The subtitle sums up the book very nicely... it is full of tips to help you speed up the web, regardless of how you usually go about using it.

I've had the pleasure of owning both copies of Web Performance Tuning and I must say the second edition was quite a dramatic rewrite, adding over 100 pages of new and updated information - it was about time for an update considering the age of the book.

Of course, if you are both a web user and a web developer you will derive the most benefit as pretty much everything in the book will apply to you to some degree. Part I focuses on detailing the problems that can occur, and only the first chapter has any useful information for anyone who is simply the web visitor. But if you've got any interest in knowing about server and connection failures and monitoring web performance then it would be worth taking a look at.

Part II of Web Performance Tuning actually looks at how you can improve your web experience; starting from the browser and working all the way through to the technologies that power the web. This makes it easy to follow as well as to help identify exactly where any major problems you may be experiencing are caused.

For those wanting quick answers to their browsing or server problems, then you will find help in the form of questions you might want to ask yourself right at the start of the book. I preferred the old way this quick reference was done, as it was a list of recommendations rather than a list of questions; you don't know you have a problem if you don't know the questions to ask!

Great guidelines for what to look for and how things work! I'd recommend this book to anyone running a website.