Posted by Carlos Guerrero on September 25, 2006
The main way to improve the response time of a dinamic web site is caching. If we have cached a copy of the request made by the user is not necessary to create the page again with the scripting language and accesing to the database.
Nowadays the number of webs which pages are very similar between then and that are updating along the time with little changes, for example weblogs, news sites, … are getting higher. If our minimal cache unit is a page, with each changes the cached pages get invalid. If we make the minimal cache size less than pages, we can solve this situation.
Edge Side Includes (ESI) gives the way to define parts of a page. If we cache this parts instead of the whole page, the number of invalidations will be smaller.
If you want learn more about ESI [click here]
Posted by Carlos Guerrero on September 22, 2006
In all web performance research is needed to make load and stress tests to the developed or studied system/architecture. Sometimes the only solution is to build one tool to do it, but sometimes it could be used a general one. In this link there are a collection of more popular load and perfermance Test Tools. [click here]
In my work I’ve used JMeter (Java desktop application from the Apache Software Foundation designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. Originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions; may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). Can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types; can make a graphical analysis of performance or test server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.).