As long as there's been a Web, people have been trying to make itfaster. The maturation of the Web has meant more users, more data,more features, and consequently longer waits on the Web. Improvedperformance has become a critical factor in determining theusability of the Web in general and of individual sites inparticular. Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition is aboutgetting the best possible performance from the Web. This book isn'tjust about tuning web server software; it's also about streamliningweb content, getting optimal performance from a browser, tuningboth client and server hardware, and maximizing the capacity of thenetwork itself. Web Performance Tuning hits the groundrunning, giving concrete advice for quick results -- the "bluntinstruments" for improving crippled performance right away. Thebook then shifts gears to give a conceptual background of theprinciples of computing performance. The latter half of the bookexamines each element of a web transaction -- from client tonetwork to server -- to find the weak links in the chain and showhow to strengthen them. In this second edition, the book has beensignificantly expanded to include: New chapters on Web site architecture, security,reliability, and their impact on performance Detailed discussion of scalability of Java onmulti-processor servers Perl scripts for writing web performance spidersthat handle logins, cookies, SSL, and more Detailed instructions on how to use Perl DBI andthe open source program gnuplot to generate performance graphs onthe fly Coverage of rstat, a Unix-based open source utilityfor gathering performance statistics remotely In addition, the book includes many more examples and graphs ofreal-world performance problems and their solutions, and has beenupdated for Java 2. This book is for anyone who has waited too longfor a web page to display, or watched the servers they manage slowto a crawl. It's about making the Web more usable for everyone.