Chapter 3. The Performance Roles of Key Web Site Components

Your web site is a system of many interconnected components. So far, we've discussed only the performance issues surrounding the web application and the Java runtime environment while mostly ignoring the rest of the web site. This chapter begins looking outward from the web application to the many other components of your web site. Remember that a web site is only as fast as its slowest component. If you tune your web application but fail to tune an underperforming network, your customer still experiences poor performance. To make the web site fast, we must evaluate its performance as a whole and tune any element not meeting performance requirements.

In this chapter, we review the essential hardware and software components of a typical web site. We cover the basics of your network as well as discussing key web site elements like load balancers and HTTP servers. We also review some common web site topologies, along with the essentials of scaling and clustering.