Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding technical analysis, but often too UNIX-centric
Review: "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.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding technical analysis, but often too UNIX-centric
Review: "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.
Rating:
Summary: High Performance Book
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: fantastic book
Review: Great guidelines for what to look for and how things work! I'd recommend this book to anyone running a website.
Rating: 
Summary: Too general and too Unix specific
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Learn a lot
Review: I haven't finished it yet, but it's very interesting, complete approach, methodological and comprehensive. I would recommend it to any webmaster, web administrator or simply someone who wants to understand what's under the hood. Buy *unix ! Bye NT! :-)
Rating: 
Summary: Thanks & please write more!
Review: I'm the author. I think the book is very useful right now, and I'm reading every comment here and all e-mail to p@patrick.net to plan a future edition in a year or two. So the more you tell me about what you want to read, the better the next edition will be. To a large degree, the next book will also be the work of the readers of the first one. So thanks for the feedback. Patrick
Rating:
Summary: Finally a book on web server performance
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Unix-centric book from a Unix-centric publisher
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Not for NT/2000
Review: Not much in the book if you are looking for info. on NT/2000 based systems. A lot of the content is basic, and may not be helpful to serious/experienced users.
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