Sessions at Velocity Europe 2011 on Wednesday 9th November

A few months ago, Jeff sat on a couch in the Typekit offices, staring out the window, and wondering if everything their company had been working towards was about to slip through their fingers. How that story ends is interesting (spoiler alert: the company is still going strong), and Jeff will share lessons on how they got through it and why they were ready for it. But beyond that, he’ll look at how you, your team, your clients, or your company can cultivate a culture of making amazing things—not just on the next project, but on everything you work on for the rest of your career.

Fed up with overly complex graphing tools? Want a simple but powerful way to monitor bandwidth throughout your infrastructure? FITB (fit-bee, or “fill in the blank”) is a tool designed to make polling every switch and router in your network easier, simpler to find, and with more detail than previously possible.

Modern web applications require us to do more than just monitor network traffic. In a Web 2.0 world JavaScript execution and rendering times become increasingly important. Learn how you can use dynaTrace Ajax Edition to optimize your client side to ensure optimal performance. We will walk through a specific example to show how to find what makes your site slow and how to optimize it.

In an increasingly complex digital environment, end-user experience must be monitored exhaustively. We can’t focus only on external website performance. End-user experience must be addressed through active & passive technologies covering all B2C & B2B usages (data, voice, video), whatever the context (mobile, cloud, within or outside the firewall). ip-label will illustrate via real customer cases how they provide the largest portfolio of end-user monitoring solutions in the Application Performance Management industry.

We’re all aware that failures happen in every system, and that being prepared to respond to them is paramount. But bringing resilience to your site and your organization also means developing your anticipation muscles; to explicitly work out what fears you may have about your system’s limits and failure modes, and understand what you’ll do when those unfortunate events happen.

This creative thinking about failure is what you use to guide your architecture, your development, your processes, your hiring, and hopefully: your business.

Putting in place contingency plans for when things might go wrong means first having an engineer’s imagination for those possible failures and surprising outcomes.

I’m going to talk about walking the fine line between immobilizing paranoia and a healthy but constant sense of unease in order to build your anticipation muscles.

Performance and operability doesn’t come from simply focusing on a single part of your application or infrastructure. They come from having a systemic view of what makes your stack work, what could bottleneck it, and what could bring it down. I’ll talk about this journey from kernel to continents.

Performance has always been something we at SPIL within Technology had thoughts about, but never really had full focus on. Within Development, the main focus has always been delivering features that the business requires from us; performance was never a mindset that we had during the creation of these features. As we have a global audience of 130 million unique visitors visiting our portals daily, we came to the conclusion that we needed to have more focus in the field of performance. We could get so much more out of our current users, by increasing their browsing experience not only from well connected broadband countries but also from countries that have more scattered performance.

We’ll share with you what we had to do to get Performance on the map, challenges we faced, what we’ve been able to achieve so far and the lessons we’ve learned up until this point. Performance is now fully on our radar and we still have many things we can and will improve.

From its early days, Opera has focused on providing its users with a snappy browsing experience on a wide range of hardware and OSes. In this talk, we’ll look at the latest versions of Opera for desktop, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini and explore how they make web pages super fast.

NoSQL databases are now very popular, particularly for new projects.

However, the same assumptions about deployment and scalability that have been understood from years of working with relational databases like MySQL don’t necessarily apply in the NoSQL world.

Real world performance can really only be understood once the databases are running at scale but that’s too late to be discovering problems.

This talk will examine the more popular NoSQL databases – MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB – to point out important considerations when deploying each of these technologies.

It will include how to scale reads and writes, where each database faces bottlenecks (and how to resolve them) and how to deploy redundantly across clusters of machines.

It will draw on real case study examples from my own and other company’s usage of each database.

Google Chrome gets faster and faster with every release. We’ll talk about the latest advances as well as what the team is working on now. Chrome’s speed is great for users, but let’s not forget about developers! Chrome now has the richest developer tools for making your site as fast as possible. Come learn about the new features that have us most excited.

What to do when something goes horribly wrong in production? Well of course we hope that it never happens, but there are occasions when mistakes occur or soething unexpected comes up and your servers start chewing memory and not completing connection, everything is going to hell. At the guardian our CMS has a number of architecture decisions made that allow us to recover from almost all forms of failure, and we’ll detail how some of these work, and why we made them work they way we chose to. Once you’ve managed to patch the system into such a state that it can recover, the next vital task is to reason out why it happened and how we can fix it. There is a method that we use when addressing serious site failures, and a number of tools and approaches that you can use after the fact to try to reinterpret what happened and trace back in time.

Ghandi once said that there is more to life than increasing its speed. In the same vein there is more to making a browser amazing than making it perform fast. In this talk you’ll learn what Firefox has in store for users and developers alike and get a glimpse into how a browser can blur the line between apps and the web whilst allowing you to experience the web on your own terms.

In 2010 we started experimenting with hiphop as a means to deliver our site to our users. One of the things that became pretty clear from the start was that we needed a different way of deploying our hiphop compiled binary to our servers due to the size of the binary.

We created a bittorrent based system using a custom tracker that exploits knowledge about our datacenter setup and the location of the servers. This way we are able to deploy 500-750MB of payload to hundreds of servers in well under 3 minutes. The chosen method is generic enough to be useful to others.

The main objective of the custom tracker is to limit the use of bandwidth by the bittorrent system, and prevent flooding of rack uplinks by bittorrent clients.

The talk will discuss general architecture, implementation issues, setup, lessons learned and differences with murder by twitter…

The tracker may be released as open source, but no definitive commitment has been made to open source the tracker.

By now we all have become aware that faster websites equal to more pageviews, visitors and revenue. In order to optimize web performance most of you have adopted and put to practice the “14 rules for creating high performance websites”. However important it may be, IT organizations don’t necessarily have the resources, time or money available to devote themselves to continuous fine-tuning their web performance. But there’s still the need to optimize and improve.

It’s time to look for a “steve-in-a-box” approach, automation of web performance optimization. But where to start, what is the ideal type of product or implementation for me? What will it cost or save me? In this session we will cover every aspect of performance automation and more. We will cover: - Automated vs Manual optimization - Current available automated solutions - Build a business case: How to determine what works best for your site? - Benchmark results of automated solutions, including comparison of: overall performance between vendors, by different types of sites and by supported optimization techniques (spriting, concat scripts, data: URI images, etc.) - Tips & Tricks for implementing performance automation within your organization

All test data will be shared publicly, including detailed overview of test setup.

Mobile browser performance is constrained by more than just bandwidth. You already know slow loading sites create a bad user experience. But even if you’ve resolved download speed, what happens to the user experience if a site is jumpy, choppy, or worse yet, non-responsive to basic interaction.

Yes, your site loads quickly even with low bandwidth. You’ve followed the 14 WOP tips. You’ve improved your sites performance, or so you think. Your app is loading quickly, but why is it not responding quickly?

In this session you’ll learn about what YSlow and Page Speed don’t cover. We’ll talk about images, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and the DOM. We’ll cover common trouble spots that lead to these poor user experiences as well as tips and techniques to prevent these trouble spots from arising.

Monitoring a large Website like XING is essential for secure, stable and fast operation. The talk will share how to set up a hands on but reliable monitoring with client site javascript and apache log file as persistence layer. Log evaluation is shown in a very DEVOPS approach using shell and awk for log parsing and statistical analysis plus munin as monitor. The talk will then share some real stories and statistics around the following subjects:

• how to monitor real-time business statistics as operations geek
• how we found the double opt in bug
• why it is so important, to investigate unanswered questions
• how twitter stats can be used as social seismograph of XING
• how to monitor real-time end user performance stats yourself (no third party needed)

Takeaways (from my memory stick or bazaar):

• Javascript client side code
• awk log parsing code
• a box full of new monitoring ideas
• A view behind the curtains of XING operations, their monitors and expertise

A website’s infrastructure always starts simply and for good reason, we don’t have users and we want to get back to writing code.

But, as a website grows, that Apache config you copied from stackoverflow is going to hit the wall. So in this talk we’ll cover the problems, signs of impending doom and typical solutions needed to get from 10 users to 100 million.

• Bullet points!
• Common web servers and how far they can get on their own.
• Signs of trouble, or why ‘top’ won’t tell you there’s a problem.
• Load-balancing, software vs hardware.
• Making the web faster for your users, especially in Europe.
• Oh, load-balancing webservers, that’s quaint. Try load-balancing continents. Love, GSLB.

This is a mid-level technical talk, aimed at the developer or ops guy who’s looking at the next step, or wondering where the last one went wrong.

There are millions and millions of them on the web, they have changed the way we deliver, share and perceive audio and video – the embeddable player widgets. The people behind omnipresent Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud players will discuss the current challenges in the embeddable content world – scalability, transition from Flash to HTML5, web performance and platform integrations.