My friend Peter's consulting business. Peter worked on performance at MySQL, and he writes the extremely useful MySQL Performance Blog. These guys know their stuff.

Rightscale provides tools to provision and automatically adapt the size of your AWS server instances to meet changes in demand. They got a couple of recommendations from the attendees at our Startpad Countdown lecture with Jeff Barr this week.

Quoted: RightScale provides a platform and consulting services that enable companies to create scalable web solutions running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less. Try it FREE!

Good data, don't rely on cache.

Quoted: 40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research that shows this kind of information. And I don’t know about you, but these results came to us as a big surprise. It says that even if your assets are optimized for maximum caching, there are a significant number of users that will always have an empty cache. This goes back to the earlier point that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time. The percentage of users with an empty cache for different web pages may vary, especially for pages with a high number of active (daily) users. However, we found in our study that regardless of usage patterns, the percentage of page views with an empty cache is always ~20%.

A brief history of Squidoo. Now at 7M monthly visits and 14M monthly page views (estimated revenue -> $30,000/month).

I generally agree.

Quoted: As a tech-founder myself (and a career software guy), I have to reiterate David's comment above. I'm not suggesting that you create a crappy system and ignore fundamentally good practices. Just don't go overboard on the optimization too early in the game.

Very interesting interview - validates what I believed was the death of Friendster - poor execution on site performance. You can be first to market, but if you can't keep up with demand, someone else will lap you.

Quoted: we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their friends. I remember coming in to the office for months reading thousands of customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had just launched called MySpace…the rest is history.

Quoted: The main advantage of the JoCaml version is that, unlike the C++ one (based on threads), it only takes a one-line change to make it run in multiple machines.

s