Chapter 11. Performance

Your web site can probably be made to run faster, if you are willing to make a few tradeoffs, and spend a little time benchmarking your site to see what is really slowing it down.

There are a number of things that you can configure differently to get a performance boost. Although, there are other things to which you may have to make more substantial changes. It all depends on what you can afford to give up and what you are willing to trade off. For example, in many cases, you may need to trade performance for security, or vice versa.

In this chapter, we make some recommendations of things that you can change, and we warn against things that can cause substantial slow-downs. Be aware that web sites are very individual, and what may speed up one web site may not necessarily speed up another web site.

Topics covered include hardware considerations, configuration file changes, and dynamic content generation, which can all be factors in getting every ounce of performance out of your web site.

Very frequently, application developers develop programs in conditions that don't nearly enough reflect the conditions under which they will be run in production. Consequently, the application that seemed to run adequately fast with the test database of 100 records, runs painfully slowly with the production database of 200,000 records. By ensuring that your test environment is at least as demanding as your production environment, you greatly reduce the chances that your application will perform unexpectedly slowly when you roll it out.