Where the Rubber Meets the Road
By Jim Jagielski
Where computing performance is concerned, it's easy to get spoiled. For personal use, I alternate between an Apple Dual G4 running Mac OS X 10.1, a Sun Blade running Solaris 8, and a Pentium 4 running Linux. I'm always looking for ways to tweak more speed out of my systems. I gauge overall speed by how long it takes to compile some of my favorite development packages. If I can read the compiler output during the build process, it's too slow.
But while this simple benchmark may work for desktop workstations, it's the wrong way to address the performance of an organization's infrastructure as a whole. In many cases, the computational speed of servers is only a small factor. Although the speed at which a server compiles applications gives some indication of its processor's integer performance, and thus, how quickly it will be able to run the applications themselves, this factor is seldom the bottleneck in most infrastructures. Especially in the Web world, with the demands that broadband and streaming content bring to bear, some of the best performance tweaks aren't server-specific.
Unique Considerations of Broadband
Traditionally, the Web has been a "bursty" network environment. Clients issue short requests and servers return somewhat longer data. Because most requests come from slow connections, most developers try to keep the data served as small and as compact as possible. Images and HTML alike are compressed and optimized. And because the servers usually enjoy faster connections than the clients, most infrastructure architects worry more about having sufficient processes or threads to handle scores of concurrent client requests, than they do about saturated networks.<>
