No matter the site, the traffic, the scope or content, a tip of the hat should always be gestured to the scale it needs to support. Not to say any effort should be put forth to make it the most scalable site or webapp in the universe, but certainly a little thought is allowed. Of course, I’ve said plenty of times before and will continue to: don’t fall into the trap of premature optimization. It’s dumb. And in most cases, developing to solve existing scalability issues is a business case most people are willing to take as it will (generally) save time, money, sanity and morale in the long run. Regardless, I also believe there are simple simple steps everyone setting up a site can take. Not as a premature optimization, but as a logical, default method of installing your web tier to ensure it’s optimized out of the box. Particularly when it’s combining different pieces of proven technology and enabling their features to prevent needless overhead, it’s no longer premature, it’s simply expected.
Posts Tagged: Scalability
12
Apr 10
Scaling Your Applications with a Snuggie
People have grown accustom of battling the evil curse of ignorance. There’s no avoiding it. There is, however, education that can help subside some of the symptoms of this crippling disease. Most of the time, I can ride my horse, Apathy, through the Deserts of Ignorance, closing my eyes and ears to the misinformed sand-storms along the way. Still, there are times I feel just passionate enough to actually say something. So here I am. On my soapbox once again speaking to a mirror about preparing your application for the web and its massive scale.
1
Dec 09
Configure Your Web Server to Merge, Cache and Compress Dependent Js and Css Files.
It’s a well known trick by most developers and sysadmins alike to merge your static files into one another to reduce communication overhead between your servers and your coveted visitors. The premise is a simple one: if you require clients to download six JavaScript files, pipe them into a single file and have them download the single file instead of six. You just cut your static request cycle down by 83%. Good for you. The truth is, there are a lot of ways to do this as it’s a pretty well known and practiced concept. The problem is there has never been a simple; language, application and framework agnostic method of doing this with minimal (to no) intervention. They either suggest you use built-in functions like the following, injecting the JS onto the literal page:
Continue reading →
19
Aug 09
Avoiding Latency when Using 3rd Party Widgets and Plugins
Anyone maintaining a site, blog or similar at some point has been tempted to add a widget or plugin provided by a 3rd party source. Twitter, Digg and ShareThis are just a few examples of sites that provide code and/or plugins (widgets) to help provide some level of dynamic and valued content. Although each of these can be incredibly useful (at least I think so as I’ve installed the Twitter WordPress plugin on this blog), they implicitly add page-rendering dependencies to your site as anyone who visits waits around for their code to load. Generally, this isn’t all that big of a deal as most of these sites have incredible uptime. But then there are sites like Twitter who seem to have some serious issues of staying alive. Particularly with plugins for content management applications like WordPress and the like, you have very little control into where the source will be loaded in the document and without any intervention, a staggering Twitter will throw your site into a tail-spin of foot tapping until your visitor’s browser finally gets fed up (after 30 seconds or so) and gives up the download. In the meanwhile, expect that person to not only leave your site but likely never come back. Not exactly what you’re looking for. Personally, I got fed up with Twitter’s lack of reliability, killing my load times and losing visitors. Luckily, if you are using a modern web server and you have access to modify the configuration, there is a simple patch you can apply to pull the reins back in and gain control of your own site performance. The example below is a patch you can apply to the Apache HTTP web server config although can be cross-ported to any of the other modern web servers that support Proxying.