Web Performance Tuning

by Patrick Killelea

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 059600172X
• ISBN13: 9780596001728
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Unix-centric book from a Unix-centric publisher

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.

Excellent discussion of lots of topics

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!

Concise, complete, and credible

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.

fantastic book

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

excellent introduction to web performance

Web Performance Tuning is the place to start if you're in charge of a web site's performance. It at least introduces all of the issues you are likely to run into. It could be improved by more detailed information on one particular web server, say Apache, and more information on assuring reliability, but as a place to start in improving web site performance, it's the best book out there.