Thursday, February 16, 2006
ongoing · The Real AJAX Upside:
"People like it because it’s snappy and responsive and lets you do nifty interactive stuff in the browser. But AJAX may be a big enough network-engineering win that the UI sparkle starts to look like a fringe benefit. Herewith some illustrations by example and a snicker at history.
As I wrote recently, I made some updates around the picture rotation here at ongoing, and I’m kind of fanatical about performance. Thus, this little meditation.
Servers are Busy · A really good way to achieve high performance in a web server is to not look at the data you’re sending out; just fetch files off the disk (or if you really must, fields out of a database) and pump ’em down the wire as-is. This allows you to use, almost entirely, the highly-optimized code paths in your filesystem and database and webserver. As soon as the server starts doing dynamic data parsing and mingling at request time, that’s a potential performance bottleneck, which can cause a world of pain when you get that real big traffic surge. ¶
A server’s compute resources are usually at a premium, because it’s, you know, serving lots of different client computers out there. Lots of different computers, you say; and how busy are they? Not very; your average Personal Computer usually enjoys over 90% idle time..."
"People like it because it’s snappy and responsive and lets you do nifty interactive stuff in the browser. But AJAX may be a big enough network-engineering win that the UI sparkle starts to look like a fringe benefit. Herewith some illustrations by example and a snicker at history.
As I wrote recently, I made some updates around the picture rotation here at ongoing, and I’m kind of fanatical about performance. Thus, this little meditation.
Servers are Busy · A really good way to achieve high performance in a web server is to not look at the data you’re sending out; just fetch files off the disk (or if you really must, fields out of a database) and pump ’em down the wire as-is. This allows you to use, almost entirely, the highly-optimized code paths in your filesystem and database and webserver. As soon as the server starts doing dynamic data parsing and mingling at request time, that’s a potential performance bottleneck, which can cause a world of pain when you get that real big traffic surge. ¶
A server’s compute resources are usually at a premium, because it’s, you know, serving lots of different client computers out there. Lots of different computers, you say; and how busy are they? Not very; your average Personal Computer usually enjoys over 90% idle time..."
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