Any recommendations for a book about building and running high performance, high-availability web sites on Linux?
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3look here: http://serverfault.com/questions/32963/website-recommendations/33052 – pQd Aug 17 '09 at 08:10
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2What would a "right" answer to this look like? I think this should be a community wiki question. – Bill Weiss Aug 24 '09 at 21:27
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Yes, I actually made a mistake. I was going to add a bounty for another question but didn't notice before it was too late. – Arne Evertsson Aug 26 '09 at 10:35
7 Answers
Theo Schlossnagle has a book called Scalable Internet Architectures which is excellent.
There's a list on highscalability.com here http://highscalability.com/book-store

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The book-store moved to here: http://astore.amazon.com/possiboutpos-20 – Bill Paetzke May 12 '10 at 22:26
Two of my favorites:
- Building Scalable Web Sites - Cal Henderson
- The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources - John Allspaw

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1+1 for Cal Henderson's book as the best introduction / 'overview of what you need to know' book. You can then later deep-dive into specific technologies as needed. We should also mention http://highscalability.com/ as the primary news aggregator in this area. – Aug 23 '09 at 15:30
Depending on what db you use I would highly recommend "High Performance MySQL" if you go with MySQL.

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use static html files or dynamic files that are heavily cached.
Install the following extensions for Firefox:
Firebug: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
Yslow: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369
Page Speed: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html
Yslow and Page speed will rate your current site, and tell you where your site needs improvement.

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A lot of useful articles about high perfomance websites you can find at http://webo.name/articles/

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Building Scalable Web Sites (by Cal Henderson) and The Art of Capacity Planning (by John Allspaw) are two of my favourites.
Nowadays, I'm waiting for the long awaited "Web Operations - Keeping the Data on Time", by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, which will be released in June.

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Enterprise Rails is a great resource for this and definitely goes beyond the scope of the title of the book.

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