This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.

Pick Your Battles

Author: Zef Hemel.

In the quest to maximise performance of your site it is tempting to turn to the latest and greatest, shiniest, whiz-bang tools. Working with the latest technologies comes with a price – they don’t call it bleeding edge for naught! Zef Hemel writes of his experience with Cloud9 and their implementation of the hottest solution at the time – node.js and redis DB. There are many interesting technological problems that come with being a pioneer, and solving these may not serve your mission as well as using older, stable, well understood tools.

Billions (of API requests) Served

Author: Dave Engberg.

Evernote’s lessons and tips in moving from their old mySQL/InnoDB data warehouse to the new Hadoop/Hive – ParAccel – JasperReports solution. Working with the newest technologies means hitting more uncharted edge scenarios and not being able to reuse the discoveries of other pioneers. But in the end Evernote comfortably handles 200 million API events per day to work with the hundreds of terabytes of online data.

Use The Index, Luke!

Author: Markus Winand.

Use The Index, Luke is a free (Creative Commons by-nc-nd) SQL indexing and tuning tutorial for developers. This vendor independent resource explains SQL indexing from the source code perspective while unnecessary internal DB details are kept to a minimum.

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Author: Ernie Souhrada.

SQL 5.0 brought us the index merge optimiser plan. At first glance, utilising multiple keys should speed things up considerable. Ernie Souhrada writes about how In practice this optimisation often isn’t optimal.

Google Pagespeed Scalability with Memory Locking

Author: webperformance.com.

Google Pagespeed has an experimental memory locking feature which is a lot faster than file locking. Interestingly, some sites have faster page load times with pagespeed with memory locking, than without pagespeed at all.

Simulate Network Latency, Packet Loss, and Low Bandwidth on Mac OSX

Author: Joe Miller.

Testing site performance and generating synthetic benchmarks provides valuable feedback to developers. Real User Monitoring provides real external metrics. Enhancing the synthetic test to introduce external factors such as latency and packet loss is achievable on any testing platform. Joe Miller explains how to do this WAN simulation on Mac OSX using freely available tools which are included in ‘dummynet’ from FreeBSD.

Switch Your Databases To Flash Storage. Now. Or You’re Doing It Wrong.

Author: Brian Bulkowski.

Brian Bulkoski creates a strong argument for the use of SSD over rotational drives in cases where drive access could become the bottleneck. Three important configuration steps are detailed to help anyone who is tuning for SSD storage.

Performance Tuning Windows 2012: Storage Subsystem – Part 1

Author: Ard-Jan Barnas

This discussion of performance considerations for your Windows 2012 storage subsystem walks through the various parts of storage and their implications on performance. A good plan includes forecasting usage and then considering various tools and technologies to roll into the appropriate solution.

Linux TCP/IP Tuning for Scalability

Author: Philip Tellis.

Scalability and performance can and should be addressed at all levels of website delivery. In this article, Philip Tellis touches on a few key TCP/IP settings in linux which can be tuned to provide more increases to efficiency and performance.