Blog Listing

June 22, 2013 · by Philip Tellis
Setting Up SSL on nginx for Performance and Security
At WebPerfDays Silicon Valley 2013 we ended up with an intense debate about the usefulness of SSL vs. the performance of SSL. The primary problem seemed to be that there was no simple, step-by-step guide on how to set up SSL correctly. Now, I’m no expert on SSL performance, but I did have to learn how to set SSL up...
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December 12, 2012 · by Philip Tellis
The Non-Blocking Script Loader Pattern
Way back when, in the early days of web performance (ca. 2005), the suggested way to embed third-party scripts in web pages was to use a straight up <script> node. This was simple, and what happened next was deterministic. The rest of the page blocked until this script node had loaded and executed. <html> <head> <script src="http://some.site.com/script.js"></script> <!-- And now...
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September 27, 2012 · by Philip Tellis
Linux TCP/IP Tuning for Scalability
We’re a web performance company, and performance and scalability go hand in hand. Better scalability results in more consistent performance and at Akamai, we like pushing our hardware as far as it will go. Today’s post is about some of the infrastructure we use and how we tune it to handle a large number of requests. We have separate components...
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