Good book for building high performance web sites?

Any recommendations for a book about building and running high performance, high-availability web sites on Linux?


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


Two of my favorites:

  • Building Scalable Web Sites - Cal Henderson
  • The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources - John Allspaw

Depending on what db you use I would highly recommend "High Performance MySQL" if you go with MySQL.


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.