Web Operations : Keeping the Data On Time

Learn how to build and maintain high-traffic websites with Web Operations. Featuring essays from today's top web engineers, this insightful book shows you how to run your web operations as reliably and effectively as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! run theirs. Even if your site never gets that big, you'll profit from the experience and knowledge of the people who created sites for these and other industry giants. Inspired by Velocity, O'Reilly's popular web performance and operations conference, Web Operations is the first comprehensive book available on this emerging discipline. With it, you'll focus less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together, taking into account topics such as incident handling, business continuity planning, community management during outages, and much more. Help your websites run faster and more smoothly while handling more traffic. Perform upgrades to the site while minimizing downtime, and learn how to avoid problems that might arise in the process. Handle huge surges in traffic that come with successful new products, so that your site remains stable despite the demand. Why design for failure? Plan ahead and learn how to avoid - or solve - the performance problems you're likely to run into when your site really takes off Read more... Abstract: Learn how to build and maintain high-traffic websites with Web Operations. Featuring essays from today's top web engineers, this insightful book shows you how to run your web operations as reliably and effectively as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! run theirs. Even if your site never gets that big, you'll profit from the experience and knowledge of the people who created sites for these and other industry giants. Inspired by Velocity, O'Reilly's popular web performance and operations conference, Web Operations is the first comprehensive book available on this emerging discipline. With it, you'll focus less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together, taking into account topics such as incident handling, business continuity planning, community management during outages, and much more. Help your websites run faster and more smoothly while handling more traffic. Perform upgrades to the site while minimizing downtime, and learn how to avoid problems that might arise in the process. Handle huge surges in traffic that come with successful new products, so that your site remains stable despite the demand. Why design for failure? Plan ahead and learn how to avoid - or solve - the performance problems you're likely to run into when your site really takes off Oracle system performance inefficiencies often go undetected for months or even years--even under intense scrutiny--because traditional Oracle performance analysis methods and tools are fundamentally flawed. They're unreliable and inefficient. Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In this crucial book, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes. Optimizing Oracle Performance eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. You can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes--even if the problem is several years old. Optimizing Oracle Performance cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any DBA can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable--even dramatic--improvements. For example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. Naturally, DBAs focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. But it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, and wait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. And an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either. It doesn't have to be that way. Technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed, and practicality to the science of Oracle performance optimization. Optimizing Oracle Performance shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance. The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used. A web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application's lifetime. It's the expertise you need when your start-up gets an unexpected spike in web traffic, or when a new feature causes your mature application to fail. In this collection of essays and interviews, web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll offer insights into this evolving field. You'll learn stories from the trenches--from builders of some of the biggest sites on the Web--on what's necessary to help a site thrive. Learn the skills needed in web operations, and why they're gained through experience rather than schooling Understand why it's important to gather metrics from both your application and infrastructure Consider common approaches to database architectures and the pitfalls that come with increasing scale Learn how to handle the human side of outages and degradations Find out how one company avoided disaster after a huge traffic deluge Discover what went wrong after a problem occurs, and how to prevent it from happening again Contributors include: John Allspaw Heather Champ Michael Christian Richard Cook Alistair Croll Patrick Debois Eric Florenzano Paul Hammond Justin Huff Adam Jacob Jacob Loomis Matt Massie Brian Moon Anoop Nagwani Sean Power Eric Ries Theo Schlossnagle Baron Schwartz Andrew Shafer Learn what it takes to build and maintain high-traffic websites with Web Operations. Featuring essays from today's top web veterans, this insightful book shows you how to run your web ops as reliably and effectively as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo run theirs. Even if your site never gets that big, you'll profit from the experience and knowledge of the people who created sites for these and other industry giants. http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920000136 Two Oracle scientists focus on optimizing Oracle performance rather than ineffectually "tuning" it, elaborating on methods that work to identify performance bottlenecks and predict and quantify the performance improvements expected from upgrades.