In a recent meet up in San Diego, we talked about Why Web Performance Matters? with Todd Minnella. Todd discusses best practices for maintaining fast and reliable user interfaces and web services. He lives and breathes performance daily! For more information on our San Diego Web Performance meetup, check out http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-SanDiego/.

1. Musings on Web
Performance from
an Ops Guy
Todd Minnella
San Diego Web Performance Meetup
March 7, 2012
1 © Neustar, Inc.

2. About Todd
» Over 25 years doing
IT operations/support
» Experience with both
academic and enterprise computing
» Currently, managing the Systems Operations
team for Webmetrics/BrowserMob at Neustar
» Favorite operating system is Tru64
» Loves solving problems!
2 © Neustar, Inc.

3. Agenda
» Foundations of Web Performance
» Getting to Stability
» Building High Performing Systems
» High Quality Operations
3 © Neustar, Inc.

4. Start with the Basics . . .
Fast
Available
Useful Service
4 © Neustar, Inc.

5. Useful Site/Service
Does your site work?
5 © Neustar, Inc.

6. Available
Is your site running?
6 © Neustar, Inc.

7. Fast
Is your site performing
well?
7 © Neustar, Inc.

8. Useful Site/Service
If your application or service
 isn’t useful for customers, or
 doesn’t work well
Talk to your Product, QA or
Engineering teams!
8 © Neustar, Inc.

9. Getting to Stability
9 © Neustar, Inc.

10. Solve for Stability First
» Track problems that have operational impact
» Triage these problems, and focus on the BIG
challenges
» Be willing to question the way things are –
ask why a lot!
10 © Neustar, Inc.

11. Be Transparent Inside and Out
» Share your problems with interested/affected
stakeholders
» Start with internal, and share to external
customers (if you can)
» Problem reports can help build righteous
outrage and get you help
11 © Neustar, Inc.

12. A Few Troubleshooting Thoughts
» Get to know what normal looks like
» Understand your dependencies (and dependents)
» Know your limits (and when you reach them)
» Consider the effects of high load and latency
» Make sure high availability/fault tolerant features
aren’t making things worse
12 © Neustar, Inc.

13. Building High Performing
Systems
13 © Neustar, Inc.

14. Design for Performance
» Know your requirements
» If you’re involved at the design phase, strive
for simplicity
» Don’t optimize too early (get the application
running first)
» Consider your customers’ bottlenecks
14 © Neustar, Inc.

15. High Performing Web Apps
» Test and monitor at production scale where
possible
» Monitor production thoroughly
» Watch for changes!!!
» Be aware of changes in your hosting
ecosystem
15 © Neustar, Inc.

16. A Performance Problem
» Planned migration of WM UI to new hardware . . .
16 © Neustar, Inc.

17. Performance Improved!
» And the results of modifying our load balancer profile:
17 © Neustar, Inc.

18. And a Caution . . .
» Know the changes affecting your monitors:
» Stay abreast of changes from your monitoring vendor(s)!
18 © Neustar, Inc.

19. High Quality Operations
19 © Neustar, Inc.

20. Ops Philosophy
»Manage change (but don’t quash it)
»Make decisions based on data
»Be transparent and honest
»Take ownership of issues
»Be a customer
20 © Neustar, Inc.

21. Suggested Reading
Web Operations
John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins
The Visible Ops Handbook
Kevin Behr, Gene Kim & George Spafford
The Practice of System and Network Administration
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan & Strata R. Chalup
Complete Web Monitoring
Alistair Croll & Sean Power
Any of the Short Topics in System Administration series
Published by the USENIX Association
21 © Neustar, Inc.

22. Suggested Tools
Cacti
http://www.cacti.net/
Splunk
http://www.splunk.com/
Wireshark
http://www.wireshark.org/
QuickBase
http://quickbase.intuit.com/
ServiceNow
http://www.service-now.com/
22 © Neustar, Inc.

23. Questions
and
Open Discussion
23 © Neustar, Inc.