Showing posts with label optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label optimization. Show all posts

Professional IIS 7 Review

Professional IIS 7
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Professional IIS 7 ReviewPeople often ask me how I like Vista and whether I think it's better than Windows XP or not. My standard reply is that I would have switched to Windows Vista for IIS 7 alone (I also do like many other Vista features, and thus prefer Vista over XP but that's beside the point here). In my opinion, IIS 7 is in many respects a lot better than its predecessor IIS 6 which runs on Windows XP and Server 2003. Besides the many new features that IIS 7 brings, it has one big advantage over the version running on Windows XP: it allows you to create multiple web sites that can run at the same time. No more messing around with tools like IIS Admin Pro although it was extremely useful in working around the limitations of IIS on Windows XP.
But with a new release of a complex piece of software as IIS is also comes the need for more knowledge and background information of the product. This is where the Wrox book Professional IIS 7 written by Kenneth Schaefer et al proved to be very useful.
The book is primarily aimed at administrators who manage Windows server running IIS 7. However, I'd also recommend the book to developers as they'll get a firm grasp of what goes on in the web server they're developing against. As an administrator, it's useful if you can read (or better yet, write) programming code as the book contains many code examples that show you how to create, edit and manage your IIS web sites (and more) through code and command line tools. As a developer, be prepared to learn a lot about how IIS works, and how to operate it, but don't expect too much in the field of actually developing web sites that will eventually run on IIS.
The book contains 20 chapters and is split over four parts. The first four chapters deal with topics like the history of IIS and compare the way the various flavors of IIS have worked in the past and how IIS 7 works now. You'll also learn more about the IIS architecture, with important sections on application pools, worker processes and the new "integrated pipeline mode" that allows you to deeply integrate your own managed .NET code into IIS. The chapter on planning is useful in helping you to determine requirements for things like software, hardware, network, and firewalls.
The installation process of IIS 7 is pretty straightforward and you'll probably be able to install IIS 7 yourself without a lot of instructions. However, if you've never installed IIS 7 before you may appreciate the large number of screenshots from the installation process in chapter 4. To me, the added value of that chapter was in the second half of the chapter where you learn how to create IIS sites, application pools, users and how to set permissions using command line tools and .NET code. Useful as that section was, I am not sure I understand what it did there as large parts of chapter 5 and 6 are dedicated to programmatically creating IIS objects. The chapter on installation closes off with some very useful tips on shared configuration which comes in handy if you're responsible for setting up or managing web farms.
The second section of the book contains a number of chapters that deal with web site administration. You'll learn how to create new sites, application pools and many other necessary IIS objects, both through the user interface and through .NET code and command line tools like appcmd.exe. You'll also see how to use the new configuration file system that allows you to manage your IIS sites using simple XML based config files. This is also one of my favorite new IIS features as it allows you to copy IIS settings (site settings, users, permissions and more) from your development machine to a production server (or from a backup file to a restored web site for example, no more messing with metabase backups). Being a developer, I liked this section a lot. I was able to quickly create a .NET application that allows me to create brand new and consistently configured web sites on my Windows Vista machine with the press of a button; something that comes in handy with the many Dynamicweb CMS web sites I run locally. I also found the chapter on the FTP Server quite useful. Since the out-of-the-box version of the FTP Server requires a fixed naming and directory structure it's good to see all the strict requirements clearly listed. Also, the new FTP Server that can be downloaded from www.iis.net is discussed in detail. The only thing I wish the book had included was a walkthrough of setting up a separate FTP site with a number of users accessing specific parts of the server. For example, you may want to have an FTP server unrelated to any of your web sites, (like [...]) and then grant yourself full control to the Inetpub folder, while providing access to one or more other folders for other users, preferably using non-domain accounts. While such a setup is possible and reasonable (and often extremely easy to do with commercial FTP servers), the book won't really help you figure out how to do it.
Chapter 11 and 12 show you how to extend the web server by writing your own modules using both managed and unmanaged code. If you're wanting to write integrated modules for IIS using all of its new features, this will definitely whet your appetite, although you'll need to look for dedicated books on the subject to get a better understanding of the whole subject.
The book also contains a number of chapters on security, covering both the security of your server as your own applications using the various authentication mechanisms (Windows, basic, forms and so on) and SSL. Whether you're new to IIS 7 or not, be sure to take a good look at these chapters to get a solid understanding of security in IIS. The last part of the book contains a few remaining subjects, including load balancing web farms, programmatic configuration and management and two chapters on monitoring, performance tuning, diagnostics and trouble shooting.
Overall, Professional IIS 7 is a very solid book on administrating IIS 7. Ken Schaefer and the other authors have done a great job in bringing a lot of knowledge on IIS together in one book. The book is generally concise, contains few errors and contains a lot of useful information, examples and code snippets to help you better install, manage and use your new IIS 7. I'd give the book 4.5 out of 5 stars.Professional IIS 7 OverviewAs the first update to Microsoft's server operating system in nearly five years, Windows Server 2008 boasts the new Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7), which is the largest departure from previous versions of IIS ever. Written by an author team that includes four Microsoft MVPs, this book shows you how to take advantage of these exciting new features of IIS 7. With a clear understanding of IIS 7, you'll learn to deploy, install, monitor, manage, and secure an IIS environment with confidence and ease.
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

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Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning with CDROM Review

Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning with CDROM
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Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning with CDROM ReviewIf the idea of slow database response scares you, this is a good place to start. You hear "tuning a database" a lot, but most of it comes too late. There are some queries that no disks, no CPU, and no amount of memory can speed up. Guy Harrison (well named) is expert on tuning SQL, and knows how to write about it in a way that makes it easy for you to benefit.
Besides giving you lots examples of how SQL and PL/SQL can work well, Guy shows you how to use the tools (explain plan, SQL*Trace, Tkprof) that let you know when you are getting close. Actually, he points out that you need to set performance goals early on, and keep testing to see if you are on track; if you don't do that early, it may be too late when you realize you need help. One of my favorite sections is on tuning joins and sub-queries and the accompanying graph showing 197,664 block gets if you do it wrong (wrong index), and 45 if you do it right (using pl/sql instead of correlated subqueries).
The title of this review aside, Guy has good sections on tuning an instance, looking at instance settings and hardware, that can be helpful if you get the application working well and still have slow response times, but most of the chances to have an application that works are available during planning and development, and this book defintely helps there. If you like working with Oracle, and want to know more, you will benefit from this book.Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning with CDROM Overview61423-0 The complete developer's guide to optimizing Oracle SQL code. Optimizing SQL code is the #1 factor in improving Oracle database performance. Yet most guides to Oracle tuning virtually ignore SQL. Until now. Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning zeroes in on SQL, showing how to achieve performance gains of 100% or more in many applications. Expert Oracle developer Guy Harrison presents a detailed overview of SQL processing, and then introduces SQL tuning guidelines that improve virtually any application. Learn how to:*Choose execution plans. *Work with joins. *Search for nulls and ranges. *Trace SQL statement execution. *Build indexes that support efficient queries. *Optimize virtually all type of SQL including: views, hierarchical queries, table scans, GROUP BY, updates, subqueries, distributed SQL, and more.As databases grow, and ad hoc queries to data warehouses increase, optimizing SQL becomes even more critical. Harrison offers practical guidance on using Oracle's parallel query facility for large-volume queries, and shows when to use Oracle's PL/SQL instead of standard SQL.The book is replete with examples, showing poorly tuned SQL, how to fix it-and specific performance measurements collected on a wide range of computer hardware, from high-end UNIX SMP hosts to 486 laptops running Personal Oracle.The CD-ROM contains an extraordinary collection of Oracle SQL tuning tools, including:*A complete freeware Tuning Toolkit for generating SQL execution plans in a Windows environment, and for monitoring server load and efficiency. *Trial versions of the SQLab tuning environment, Precise/SQL tuning tools, and SQL Navigator development environment. *Full-function 90-day trial versions of Personal Oracle for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.If your Oracle applications must deliver supercharged performance, you can't afford to be without Guy Harrison's Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning.

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High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers Review

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
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High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers Review§
_High Performance Web Sites_ is one of those books that will get read by more people than buy it because it is both a fast read and organized into clearly differentiated subjects. This makes it easy to pick up for a moment or pass along to team members with different specialties.
Each of these "14 Steps to Faster-Loading Web Sites" (listed in the editorial review above) is itself divided into related tips with practical pointers. The fact that the book is full of these pointers is not the only value I extracted. We also get something a bit more subtle. The fact that the author is a performance expert at one of the mega-companies that define the Web for most of us lends authority to the book. It is easy to have confidence that his practical experience will have immediate lessons for teams with the same problems, if on a smaller scale.
Steve Souders provides a special addition to his tips: his example pages offer direct comparisons and means to make our own tests. This is something rarely encountered in such books. The book ends with a 30-page chapter where he deconstructs 10 of the top Web sites in the U.S. using the rules and tools described in the book.
§High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers Overview
Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.

The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.

Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to:

Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Use a Content Delivery Network
Add an Expires Header
Gzip Components
Put Stylesheets at the Top
Put Scripts at the Bottom
Avoid CSS Expressions
Make JavaScript and CSS External
Reduce DNS Lookups
Minify JavaScript
Avoid Redirects
Remove Duplicates Scripts
Configure ETags
Make Ajax Cacheable

If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.

"If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be a dramatically better place. Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's really no excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore."

-Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM Inspector

"Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance."

-Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation


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