Synopses & Reviews
Achieve optimal website speed without compromising on qualityBuilding and maintaining high-performance websites can have a significant impact on a site's success. In addition, effective website development requires optimum performance with regard to both the web browser and server. Taking those factors into consideration, this platform-neutral book covers all aspects of building and maintaining websites that deliver peak performance on all levels. Longtime web developer and performance expert Peter Smith explores the ways in which websites can respond more quickly by configuring front-end performance related to the web browser, as well as the back end for speeding up the communication between the server and the browser.
Professional Website Performance:
- Examines factors such as compression and JavaScript, database performance, MySQL tuning, NoSQL alternatives, load-balancing across multiple servers, effective caching of web contents, CSS, and more
- Walks you through minimizing the performance penalties of SSL
- Discusses the dangers of premature optimization and how it can add complexity to your code
- Looks at waterfall views at the front end of a website, which show the order in which the browser is requesting resources
- Addresses scaling horizontally (increasing the number of machines in your setup) versus scaling vertically (keeping the same number of servers, but upgrading their hardware)
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Synopsis
Achieve optimal website speed and performance with this Wrox guideEffective website development requires optimum performance with regard to both web browser and server. This book covers all aspects of building and maintaining websites that deliver peak performance on all levels. Exploring both front-end and back-end configuration, it examines factors like compression and JavaScript, database performance, MySQL tuning, NoSQL alternatives, load-balancing across multiple servers, effective caching of web contents, CSS, and much more. Both developers and system administrators will find value in this platform-neutral guide.
- Covers essential information for creating and maintaining websites that deliver peak performance on both front end and back end
- Explains how to configure front-end performance related to the web browser and how to speed up communication between server and browser
- Topics include MySQL tuning, NoSQL alternatives, CSS, JavaScript, and web images
- Explores how to minimize the performance penalties of SSL; load-balancing across multiple servers with Apache, Nginx, and MySQL; and effective caching and compression of web contents
Professional Website Performance: Optimizing the Front End and Back End offers essential information to help both front-end and back-end technicians ensure better website performance.
Synopsis
The book is divided into two parts: front-end and back-end. The first details performance aspects related to the web browser (such as compression and JavaScript), while the second covers the parts of a website that run behind the scenes on the server – databases, programming, and web servers themselves. The book will be platform neutral. Key topics include:
- MySQL tuning, and NoSQL alternatives
- Minimizing the performance penalties of SSL
- Load-balancing across multiple servers with Apache, Nginx, and MySQL
- Effective caching and compression of web contents
- CSS, JavaScript, and web images
Many web developers have little understanding of performance aspects of web sites, yet this is becoming an increasingly important subject. This book will consolidate and enhance their knowledge of front-end optimization, while also giving an insight into performance of the underlying web server.
For system administrators, the book will discuss tuning of commonly used web-related applications (databases, web servers etc), and scalability solutions. Primarily the book is aimed at administrators of web sites that have outgrown a single server setup (since scalability and load balancing are recurring topics in it), but even the casual administrator of a single server should find much of use in the book.
About the Author
Peter Smith has been a full-time Linux consultant, web developer, and system administrator for more than a decade. His open source projects include modules for Apache and OSCommerce, a cross-platform IRC client, and contributions to The Linux Documentation Project.
Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION xxiii
PART I: FRONT END
CHAPTER 1: A REFRESHER ON WEB BROWSERS 3
CHAPTER 2: UTILIZING CLIENT-SIDE CACHING 23
CHAPTER 3: CONTENT COMPRESSION 39
CHAPTER 4: KEEPING THE SIZE DOWN WITH MINIFICATION 53
CHAPTER 5: OPTIMIZING WEB GRAPHICS AND CSS 71
CHAPTER 6: JAVASCRIPT, THE DOCUMENT OBJECT MODEL, AND AJAX 111
PART II: BACK END
CHAPTER 7: WORKING WITH WEB SERVERS 141
CHAPTER 8: TUNING MYSQL 193
CHAPTER 9: MYSQL IN THE NETWORK 255
CHAPTER 10: UTILIZING NOSQL SOLUTIONS 309
CHAPTER 11: WORKING WITH SECURE SOCKETS LAYER (SSL) 359
CHAPTER 12: OPTIMIZING PHP 375
PART III: APPENDIXES
APPENDIX A: TCP PERFORMANCE 405
APPENDIX B: DESIGNING FOR MOBILE PLATFORMS 409
APPENDIX C: COMPRESSION 417
INDEX 427