Tech Presentations

Another interesting presentation about web performance from Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team, this time by Stoyan Stefanov, lead developer, YSlow.

20 more tips-n-tricks, a couple new tools and more interesting numbers. I wish there was a video with all minor details that slides don’t convey.

See on TechPresentations.org: High Performance Web Pages

Also see first High Performance Webpages presentation by Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer at Web 2.0 Expo 2007.

Very thorough overview of techniques to improve real and perceived performance of front-end heavy web applications by Julien Lecomte. Not only browser-server communication, but page rendering, JavaScript parsing, DOM manipulations, memory leaking and so on. He also mentions whole lot of tools for development and profiling.

See on TechPresentations.org: High Performance Ajax Applications

Presentation about WSGI and Pylons framework by Ben Bangert from O’Reilly Media given on September 13, 2006 (video)

Ron Bodkin talks about automated Java web application troubleshooting using Glassbox at Google TechTalk (video) on September 25, 2006.

Interesting quotes:

• No need to change or recompile the code
• Low performance overhead about 1% when running (about 50% on code load)
• Configurable thresholds
• AJAX-based web interface
• Monitoring multiple sources
• Uses AspectJ, 10-year old stable technology
• Extendable trackers through configuration or simple code
• Preconfigured tracked actions:
  • Database connections
  • Database calls
  • Thread synchronization issues
  • Failures/slowness in web services, EJBs, other remote calls
  • Things that use too much CPI
  • Error pages and exceptions in Java processing
  • Time spent at a dispatch layer
• Future features / plans:
  • Integration with existing monitoring infrastructures companies have built
  • Monitoring by specific user/session
  • Component owner-focused monitoring, e.g. Developer, Assembler, Admin (DBA/Sysadmin)
  • System training (by monitoring the process)
  • Historical views, comparison
  • Baseline comparison (system upgrades, new releases, test/production)
  • Configurable SLA (Service Level Agreement) reporting
  • Preconfigured monitors for different frameworks – more AJAX, more web frameworks, JNDI, cache, O/R mapping tools
  • System health
  • Clustering (autodiscovery, aggregation
  • Advanced analisys
• Originally closed source. Now Open Source (LGPL). Contributors wanted.

Definitely interesting technology and quite logical extension to Virtual Machine kind of environment.