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.
