This Week in Website Performance

by Warren Gaebel | Aug 13, 2012

This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitor.Us blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitor.Us care.

The Chronology of a Click, Part III

Author: Warren Gaebel.

This article continues the description of the behind-the-scenes activites from the time a user clicks on a link to the time the web page has finished loading. This part starts at the time the request leaves the browser’s machine and ends at the time the request arrives at the web server’s machine. Performance considerations are interspersed where they relate to the topic at hand.

Top Performance Mistakes when moving from Test to Production: Deployment Mistakes

Author: Andreas Grabner.

This article reviews a few common deployment mistakes: missing files, incorrect security settings or permissions, misconfigured or missing web server extensions. True, only one impacts performance, but the embarrassment that comes from the crash of a production system is pretty important, too.

Building a Stronger and Faster Web (part 1, part 2)

Author: Jeremiah Shirk.

These articles summarize a few of the presentations from Velocity 2012, including links to their videos.

• Richard Cook’s “How Complex Systems Fail”
• John Rauser’s “Investigating Anomalies”
• Jesse Robbins’ “Changing Culture & Being a force for Awesome”
• Patrick Lightbody’s “Gathering Insights from Real User Monitoring”
• Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer’s “The Performance of Web vs. Apps”
• Matt Atterbury and Mustafa Tikir’s “Using Google Sitespeed and PageSpeed Products to Debug, Improve, Measure, Iterate”

MySQL Cluster Performance Best Practices: Q & A

This article answers some questions that arose during a recent webinar on best practices for optimizing performance with MySQL Cluster:

• How do I calculate and then monitor memory usage with MySQL Cluster?
• Would enabling Disk space Table Space be an impact on the Query Performance ?
• I’ve seen that MySQL Cluster 7.2 can speed up JOIN operations by 70x. How does it do this?
• Can all JOINs use AQL?
• What are best practices for data model and query design?
• What are best practices for parallelising my application and access to MySQL Cluster?
• What hardware would you recommend to get the best performance from MySQL Cluster?

High resolution images and file size

Author: Thomas Fuchs.

Reducing the file size of images is a well-known performance tip. Reducing the resolution and compressing the image are both useful in this regard. This article briefly shows the unexpected impact on file size for .png images and suggests using quality settings instead of resolution reduction for JPEGs.

Front-End Optimization Architecture – Decisions and Implications (Part 2)

Author: Guy Podjarny.

This article provides a framework for evaluating front-end optimization tools: resource origin, resource storage, data source, and upgrade model. The other three points of comparison were discussed in last week’s article.

Avoiding SST when adding new Percona XtraDB Cluster node

Author: Frederic Descamps.

This article shows how to use backups instead of the live production database to prepare a new Percona XtraDB Cluster node, which avoids potential performance penalties.

Threats & Opportunities for a Faster and Stronger Web

Author: Albert Wenger.

This 20 minute presentation is split into 4 parts that are roughly 5 minutes each:

• 1st quarter – What made the Internet successful so far? [supportive legislation, open standards, decentralized Internet]
• 2nd quarter – What is threatening the success of the Internet? [restrictive legislation, walled gardens, controlled Internet]
• 3rd quarter – What’s happening now to counteract the threats?
• 4th quarter – What opportunities exist to convert this hierarchical thinking into network thinking?

Performance isn’t really discussed here (other than the word faster in the title), but I’ve included the article here because a large chunk of my audience may find it interesting.