Improving Performance (
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Your web presence is growing! Traffic and usage are escalating and you have to maintain a superior level of performance. The state of growth unfolds many opportunities but it also holds challenges as a result of change. Not only does performance affect your operating costs, it also reflects directly on the end-user experience. The marketing and sales departments are probably saying that happier users directly increase sales.
Unsatisfactory user experience can be traced back to any of several reasons:
• Reduced response time due to increased request/seconds on the HTTP server
• Reduced response time due to increased hits to the database
• Slow download speed due to users dialing-up with slow connections
• Undesired visitors are hacking your site
• Errors as a result of adding software to the site
• And others
Successful growth doesn't happen immediately, it is a constant cycle of evaluation and change– identifying points of fault, reporting, decision making and implementing a solution.
Implementing homegrown solutions to deal with identified issues internally often results in a patchwork of disparate systems or solutions either developed internally or purchased separately. The amount of investment needed to tackle all issues effectively at once is too great and requires major investment in critical resources such as capital and personnel.
This article will only attempt to tackle performance improvement, the first step in the cycle of growth discussed in the figure above. I will present several techniques available in the market addressing the issue of performance improvement.
Caching - What is it?
A cache is disk memory that is set aside as specialized buffer storage that is continually updated. Temporary files, such as HTML documents, are stored in the cache that is optimized for fast read-and-write access to short-lived data.
Caching is a word widely used to describe various solutions that rely on the concept of Cache. These solutions provide increased performance and scalability for Web sites. Caching solutions can be grouped as following: Proxy caching, Server-side caching and Client-side caching. The type of content to be stored is the primary factor for determining the best caching option for a Web site.
While Proxy caching is the traditional caching technique, server side caching is becoming increasingly popular as a dynamic information caching method.
