Performance

http://blog.matt-darby.com/posts/697-apache-passenger-vs-nginx-mongrel comparing 2 popular ways to deploy ruby-on-rails app

http://lwn.net/Articles/362339/#Comments notes from LWN about RPS patch – a way to distribute incoming traffic coming from 1 source (1 NIC, 1 queue, 1 IRQ line) via multiple CPU by hashing tcp headers and distributing by hash across multiple CPU/Cores

http://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2009/07/solid-state-drive-benchmarks-and-write.html read this before rushing to by some SSDs

http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebooks-memcached-multiget-hole-more-machines-more-capacit.html also see http://dormando.livejournal.com/521163.html Describing some problems with performance/scalability you may have if you partition/shard your data by hash. ( that’s what memcached does.) You may hit the cpu bound limit from the amount of requests that few very popular keys receive. Currently, there is now common way around this (perhaps because very very few sites scale to the point when this becomes an issue )

http://vger.kernel.org/netconf2009_slides/nehalem_pps_comparison.pdf test results for linux routing performance on recent intel “nehalem” CPUs and 10G ethernet

http://blogs.amd.co.at/robe/2008/12/graphing-linux-disk-io-statistics-with-munin.html tells you about a plugin (a perl script ) for munin that will collect linux disk IO stats and send it to munin for pretty graphs.

http://www.fishpool.org/post/2008/03/31/Optimizing-Linux-I/O-on-hardware-RAID explains use linux IO scheulers with presence of smart RAID controllers.

http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2009/09/nginx-internals-slides-video/ very good presentation slides explaining nginx internals, such as main architecture, main event loops, core modules, processing pipelines, etc. Also there is a video of the talk , but it is mandarin, so YMMV :-)

http://www.slideshare.net/cstrep/myoperacom-scalability-v20 slides from my.opera.com architecture presentation. Iptables/linux lvs -> apche/mod_perl -> mysql replication, varnish, memcached

http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/hi/69457/#habracut high-load web notification system or how to do persistent connections in ajax/js. Useful for counters, friend-status updates and so on. Example is given for libevent-based daemon in perl.