Operating System Usage Over the Next 4 Years
Operating System Usage Prediction
These figures are extrapolated from W3Schools.com. I have predicted data for the next 4 years with a linear scale based on the last 5 years. The vertical axis has a logarithmic scale so the OSX and Linux data is meaningful. The graph shows a very slight decline in Windows usage and a notable increase in Apple OSX and Linux usage.
Obviously there are plenty of unforseen changes that could have an effect on this graph. I see the move towards OSX from Windows in the mainstream as inevitable, and I would imagine the change is more likely to be a sudden surge over a period of months rather than a smooth decline of Windows usage over a number of years.
It is interesting to compare the initial Vista predictions made by Steven York just before Vista’s release with the real stats in hindsight. The obviously low take up of Vista leaves most users on Windows XP, which when you compare to the look and feel of modern environments (for example: Websites, Mobile Phones, Latest Apple OS) it’s very clunky and unintuitive.
The Gospels of my Performance Web Hosting Bible
There are certain things I keep close to hand when I’m presented with a new site by our development team. I use these sites and books as a basis for most criticisms, decisions and tweaks I make when deploying a new site. This detail in these guides is generally focused on LAMP sites, although the logic applies to any hosting arrangement.
Yahoo! Performance Team Research
January last year Yahoo! published possibly the most influential piece of research on the importance of speed and delivery performance when serving websites. They identified that 40-60% of Yahoo!’s users hit the site with an empty cache, and that 20% of all page views were done with an empty cache. Combine that with the knowledge that page loads times have an adverse effect on UX after 3-5 seconds of waiting and you see the importance. Keeping this in mind forms the base goal for performance hosting.
Yahoo! Performance Team Best Practices Guide & YSlow
On that note, my first gospel is the Yahoo! performance team’s Best Practices guide. I follow this guide almost religiously, and won’t rest until I’m happy the majority of points are covered. So far I’ve had nothing but extreme success following these tips. Yahoo! have released a fantastic tool based on these rules called YSlow, and extension for Firebug. This extension monitors the page load, and analyzes all the components on your page. It then scores your page and provides you with a list of suggestions to enhance performance.
Website Optimization – Andrew King
The second gospel is Website Optimization by Andrew King. This is a must read book for anybody who’s serious about performance on their web site. Not just performance hosting, but this book goes in to conversions and analytics as well as considerations when actually building the pages such as JS minification, image size optimisation in Photoshop (and not just Save for Web!), pre-loading and post-loading.
Planning Considerations
Third gospel would be Kent Langley from Joyent’s guide on designing sites that scale well. This guide I don’t consider as a point of education for me, rather proof that it’s not just me! His description of the considerations he makes daily echos my exact thoughts on scalability during the design and build process. Scalability and performance go hand in hand really, and
Simple Apache tweaks every site should have
I’m going to have to include my own guide in here from a few posts ago. It contains some very simple copy and paste entrys for your Apache config files that I believe nearly every site should have. This includes things like expire headers and mod_deflate.
Running a Big Web Site
Apache The Definitive Guide, by Ben and Peter Laurie, Chapter 12: Running a Big Web Site. This is a chapter full of what should be common sense to any web host. Of particular note though is the section on scalability and the section on load balancing and how to use mod_backhand if you can’t afford or justify a dedicated hardward solution.
Tweaking your worker limits
Apache Performance Tuning from DeveloperSide.net has a good step by step on calculating what all your prefork.c variables etc should be set to for pest performance and utlisation. Configuring this correctly is essential on a high traffic site and it’s a very fine ballance between protecting the stability of the server or cutting off your users at a way lower number than you should be. One wrong step in the wrong direction can leave you in either a massively over-cautious enviroment, where your servers load is sat somewhere around 0.3 but you can’t get a page displayed, or you can fly into a load of 150, with no chance of being able to SSH to the server let alone serve content!
Ubuntu and Active Directory in 10 Minutes
This aims to be a short and simple step-by-step guide on how to get your blank box running Ubuntu server, joined to Active Directory and login to it with your AD credentials. Once installed, you can tailor this to your own environment easily. We use this on our local development servers to allow users to have their own home directories on each server with their own sites without having to juggle 6 different passwords. It also adds security in that once a user is locked out of AD, they are locked out of everywhere.
This article assumes you already have a functioning Windows 2003 server running AD. (more…)
4 Simple Apache tweaks to speed up delivery of your web site
Add these simple directives into your Apache configuration and you should notice a considerable increase in speed in the delivery of pages. As a working example, I performed these tweaks on http://www.shortlist.com/. Here are the before and after stats:
The changes are:
- Homepage on an empty cache from 956.6k to 658.9k, both 133 requests.
- Homepage on a primed cache from 153.9k and 128 requests, to 25.9k and 8 requests. (more…)
