June, 1997: Web and Mail Performance Tuning

At our June meeting, Rob Kolstad of Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI) told us of his (actually, one of his co-workers') experience in tuning web and mail servers for optimal performance. These tuning activities involved iterating towards theoretical performance goals (determined by back-of-envelope calculations) by successively eliminating bottlenecks. Rob was sure to impress upon us not to trust your first gut feel, but to look at the performance data and let it speak to you. Rob's talk was colorful and informative as usual, for example making sure that, if we're exposed to bat urine to be sure to tell the doctor that we're at risk for histoplasmosis.

Rob's presentation on mail spamming (distribution) (PDF 547K) and web server tuning (PDF 116K) are available on the FRUUG web site.