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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 19 Ratings

Classic O'Reilly marred by thin dynamic web coverage - 2003-04-04
Reviewer Rating:
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 - without including a single diagram! 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.

High Performance Book - 2002-06-08
Reviewer Rating:
Four years in the making, the second edition of "Web Performance Tuning" is some 30% larger (456 vs. 351 pages) than the first, but don't let the increased size slow you down. Patrick Killelea makes good use of it by showing you how to get the best possible performance out of your web server, site, and browser. The primary emphasis is on tuning web server software, but tuning client and server hardware, streamlining content, getting the most bang for your byte are also covered.

Aimed at more advanced system administrators and webmasters, this book provides the tools and techniques you can use to maximize the speed and throughput of your server. The emphasis is on performance monitoring, analysis, and planning. You can't attack a performance problem until you understand it and that means measuring what's actually happening. Lucky for us, Killelea provides free scripts you can use to measure the performance of your web site at his site Patrick.net.

There you'll find scripts you can use on your Unix server to measure, monitor, and debug any performance problems you're having. Killelea also provides a web-based version of his analysis.cgi script that breaks down the components of web site response time into DNS, connect time, server silence (load), transmission (content size), and close time. Type in your URL and up pops a graph of transmission times, broken down into the above components, complete with a bottleneck analysis and some recommendations.

Speaking of bottlenecks, when it comes to web performance, smoothing out bottlenecks is the name of the game. If your server is low on memory excessive swapping can occur. If you spawn too many processes without mod_perl on board you've got a problem. Killelea's tools and prose show you where the slowdowns occur, and how to fix them for maximum speed.

Everything from low volume sites (1-10,000 hits/day) to high (over 1 million hits/day) can benefit from this in-depth book. Techniques that may work well at lower traffic levels can fall apart once the server heats up. Killelea takes a pragmatic approach to performance tuning with an emphasis on actual testing and measurement rather than overplanning, mathematical modeling, and simple yet expensive solutions.

While bandwidth is steadily increasing, latency stubbornly refuses to decrease. The speed of light isn't changing anytime soon, so addressing latency, especially on the Web, is a high priority. The other parameters of performance are throughput, utilization, and efficiency. This book will help you fine tune them all to make your web site sing.

Speed Racer - 2002-10-29
Reviewer Rating:
Four years in the making, the second edition of "Web Performance Tuning" is some 30% larger (456 vs. 351 pages) than the first, but don't let the increased size slow you down. Patrick Killelea makes good use of it by showing you how to get the best possible performance out of your web server, site, and browser. The primary emphasis is on tuning web server software, but tuning client and server hardware, streamlining content, getting the most bang for your byte are also covered.

Aimed at more advanced system administrators and webmasters, this book provides the tools and techniques you can use to maximize the speed and throughput of your server. The emphasis is on performance monitoring, analysis, and planning. You can't attack a performance problem until you understand it and that means measuring what's actually happening. Lucky for us, Killelea provides free scripts you can use to measure the performance of your web site at his own site patrick dot net.

There you'll find scripts you can use on your Unix server to measure, monitor, and debug any performance problems you're having. Killelea also provides a web-based version of his analysis.cgi script that breaks down the components of web site response time into DNS, connect time, server silence (load), transmission (content size), and close time. Type in your URL and up pops a graph of transmission times, broken down into the above components, complete with a bottleneck analysis and some recommendations.

Speaking of bottlenecks, when it comes to web performance, smoothing out bottlenecks is the name of the game. If your server is low on memory excessive swapping can occur. If you spawn too many processes without mod_perl on board you've got a problem. Killelea's tools and prose show you where the slowdowns occur, and how to fix them for maximum speed.

Everything from low volume sites (1-10,000 hits/day) to high (over 1 million hits/day) can benefit from this in-depth book. Techniques that may work well at lower traffic levels can fall apart once the server heats up. Killelea takes a pragmatic approach to performance tuning with an emphasis on actual testing and measurement rather than overplanning, mathematical modeling, and simple yet expensive solutions.

While bandwidth is steadily increasing, latency stubbornly refuses to decrease. The speed of light isn't changing anytime soon, so addressing latency, especially on the Web, is a high priority. The other parameters of performance are throughput, utilization, and efficiency. This book will help you fine tune them all to make your web site sing.

Is not just server performance tuning you know... - 2003-02-17
Reviewer Rating:
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!

A classic reference for every engineers library - 2004-06-09
Reviewer Rating:
Published in 1998, this book is one of the best for web performance testing, covering the technical basics for everything you need to know in order to really understand performance tuning. It includes such required information as definitions of various performance metrics, and what those should be in the real world, and moves along through networks, hardware, and operating systems. It goes to great pains to cover a variety of systems, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and a variety of web servers.

Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc. Stress Testing Software
http://www.webperformanceinc.com

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