How to start our Architectural Review  
We can review our architecture in 3 different aspects to evaluate its scalability and performance.

Deployment and infrastructure
Technology Stacks
Performance and Scalability Frame

Deployment and Infrastructure

Do you need a distributed architecture? If not, you better co-locate web and app server to eliminate the overhead via remote communications (ie. serialization cost and network latency). If [...]

Continue reading " Architectural Review - Scalability and Performance "

From the Yahoo research on user experience, they found out that 90% of user waiting time is coming from the frontend. So, we should start paying attention on this to get a bigger impact on our changes in a short time.

Here are the 14 rules they formulated:

Make fewer HTTP requests

Concatenate scripts and stylesheets to reduce [...]

Continue reading " Yahoo Talk - Rules to scale your Frontend "

This video is very informative that shows you how to scale a site from infancy to 100 millions view per day. It is amazing that the team behind this is very small.

Interesting areas:

Database scaling

Initially YouTube had single master multiple slaves replica database architecture. Replicating your database has many advantages. For example, backup and recovery become easier. Rather [...]

Continue reading " How YouTube tackles its scalability issues? "

This is great application to demonstrate the power of Flex
http://www.richapps.de/flexsources/richtube/richtube.html

Continue reading " RichTube - Flex-based Youtube! "

Configure Tomcat

Change port to 80. 

Edit install_dir/conf/server.xml and change the port attribute of the Connector element from 8080 to 80.

Turn on servlet reloading.

Edit install_dir/conf/context.xml and change <Context> to <Context reloadable=”true”>.

Change the default AJP/1.3 connector port of Tomcat.

Edit install_dir/conf/server.xml and change the value of the port attribute in the AJP/1.3 Connector element.

Access manager console.

Create a new username/password combination [...]

Continue reading " Tomcat 5.5 - Quick Notes "

Database index is similar to the book index that helps you quickly locate the information you want. Without index, you need to do table scan to find out a set of records that match - O(n). However, to maintain a separate list of indexes’ values and keep them updated as your data change (insert/ update/ delete), you [...]

Continue reading " Database Indexing - MySQL "

This video from Google is awesome! It gives a good summary of MySQL performance tuning in 45 minutes.  For those who want to get the quick digest from this video. I have put down some notes below. Apart from this,  I also put down the background information for some topics to make it more completed in my blog. Enjoy!
 
Transcript:
Benchmarking Core Concept

Set [...]

Continue reading " MySQL performance tuning - best practices "

Connecting businesses with their past website visitors so there is an increased likelihood of a completed transaction. Aware that current industry statistics show that on average, 90% of site visitors leave without taking action, companies are interested to employ retargeting technology to maximize opportunities to reconnect with these previous visitors and convert them into sales. [...]

Continue reading " What is retargeting? "