O'Reilly Velocity 2008

Google's web scale problems are too large to rely on physical hardware. In this talk from the 2008 Velocity Conference, Sean Quinlan of Google describes their software-based approach to reliably retrieving data that's distributed across millions of machines around the world.

Microsoft's Eric Lawrence describes Fiddler, his free Web Debugging tool that enables capture, replay, and modification of HTTP and HTTPS traffic from virtually any application.

Improving performance is impossible without good measurements, especially on a complex platform like the Web. In this presentation from 2008 Velocity Conference, Eric Goldsmith of AOL demonstrates their browser plug-in AOL Pagetest, which gathers and displays data about web requests and page loading. It's an open source project for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 that combines the strengths of several other monitoring tools.

HTTPWatch is a commercial add-in for Internet Explorer that provides detailed statistics on HTTP traffic. In this presentation from the 2008 Velocity conference, Simon Perkins of Simtec Limited demos HTTPWatch and outlines its key features, including the ability to see the effect of local caching and HTTPS traffic before it is encrypted.

In this talk from the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, Harald Prokop of Akamai describes the design principles and architecture of the Akamai network and how it enables the Internet to deliver large libraries of HD content and accelerates dynamic transactions.

Cloud computing can be a powerful tool in academic research but the costs associated with commercial implementations and the established hardware available at most universities has left a gap in the development of solutions for academic environments. Join Rich Wolski, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbra, as he discusses the challenges involved with building an open source project that gets scientists' heads into the (computing) cloud.

Scott Ruthfield describes Jiffy, a new open source performance measurement tool for measuring true client-side performance of web sites. Ruthfield identifies the components of website performance problems and the decision process that led WhitePages.com to develop their own solution. Jiffy's goals, components, and a sample implementation provide a thorough introduction to the toolkit.

Today there are tools for testing web applications, but they are difficult to use, costly, and poorly integrated with web browsers. In response to these limitations, Vik Chaudhary and Abelardo Gonzalez of Keynote Systems announce their new web testing product, the Keynote Internet Testing Environment.

Data centers are becoming more costly and complicated, and that rate is only going to continue increasing. In the presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Bill Coleman describes the unsustainable path data centers are on and the ways that they can be managed in the future.

New Web software applications perform and are used differently. Consequently, the hardware and infrastructure of yesterday is insufficient. In this presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, John Fowler of Sun Microsystems discusses the new Web application architecture components that Sun is working on, and how they work with the latest Web software.