The other side of the moon

Ok, so it's been over a month and I'm nowhere closer to writing up a proper summary of the performance BoF we had at FOSS.IN, so I'm just going to post my notes as-is:

Attendees:

Philip - Front end performance
Devdas - Throughput, latency for system
Anand - All performance
g0sub - Web applications
Anant - Firefox performance, and mobile devices
Vinayak - System & Web app performance
Tarique - Web server & database performance

Thoughts

• fast code v/s maintainable code
• should we look at code or configuration or something else?
• design for real users, not a few test users

Things to work on:

1. Configuration
2. Management/administrative code
3. Hardware
4. Instrument code for monitoring
5. trace apps even if you don't have the code by looking at sar and ltrace
6. Cheat

How to handle performance of streaming data?

Database performance - start with a denormalized db and then figure out what to normalize later

File format optimisation for performance

FOSS.IN runs in Bangalore from the 1st to the 5th of December this year. During the conference, I'll be organising a BoF meet on performance titled Websites on Speed.

In this BoF we'll each bring up a ideas and research that we've been playing with. It's expected to be fairly technical, but how detailed we get depends on what people are interested in. We'll try and cover all layers of the stack that contribute to performance problems, and get into depth on one or two areas chosen on the spot.

This isn't limited to frontend performance.

There's a lot of experimentation, tweaking and understanding of the system involved in web performance, so let's find out what's state of the art today.