A Few Notes On HTTP

Slide 1: A Few Notes On HTTP It’s How The Web Works, Stupid! Pierre Phaneuf <pphaneuf@gmail.com>

Slide 2: HTTP is core Regular web browser AJAX XML-RPC, SOAP WebDAV, CalDAV, Subversion Atom Publishing Protocol

Slide 3: Caching We all know HTTP caching is important, like flossing, and most of us leave it at that, like flossing —— David Heinemeier Hansson Set the Expires header Use 301 instead of 302 when applicable

Slide 4: But My Site Is Dynamic! Set the Last-Modified header Set the ETag header But beware! Frameworks are silly sometimes Clustering (inode numbers)

Slide 5: Compression It’s easy. It’s good.

Slide 6: Keep Alive Friend or Foe? Memory usage on the server A reverse-proxy can help

Slide 7: AJAX Increased load on servers? Decrease the load, if done right!

Slide 8: Fastest way to handle a request Not handling it! Content distribution network

Slide 9: A Golden Age Static content CGI dynamic content In-process dynamic content (Apache, ISAPI) Out-of-process dynamic content (FastCGI, WSGI)

Slide 10: Tools Firebug’s Net tab How long it took What is cached Dependencies Wireshark (and tcpdump)

Slide 11: Questions? Thank you! Pierre Phaneuf <pphaneuf@gmail.com>