This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.

How Bon-Ton Online Stores Fixed a Safari Bug In Time For The Holidays

Author: Andreas Grabner.

While it would be great to test for every possible platform that will access a website, this is clearly not practical. Bon Ton has developed a methodology to respond to customer complaints of untested configurations, in order to assess the scope and impact of the problem. This blog entry walks us through finding a cookie bug in Safari – a platform they did not specifically test for – utilising their 4 step problem-finding approach.

Performance Tuning Windows 2012: Network Subsystem–Part 1

Author: Ard-Jan Barnas.

This preliminary article in a series of network tuning for windows 2012 describes the various optimisations for all networking layers, from hardware to application. This article begins at the hardware level and guides us through the process from selecting a high-performance network adapter to beginning to optimise it’s configuration.

Analyzing Billions Of Credit Card Transactions And Serving Low-Latency Insights In The Cloud

Authors: Ivan de Prado and Pere Ferrera.

Running analyses of credit card purchases uses big data to create even bigger data which needs to be served quickly under high load. This article details how Datasalt in collaboration with BBVA bank has put together a relatively inexpensive system to do just this using AWS, Hadoop, and Voldemort.

“Thanks to the use of technologies like Hadoop, Amazon Web Services and NoSQL databases it is possible to develop quickly solutions that are scalable, flexible and prepared to stand human failures at a reasonable cost.”

Cache busting in ASP.NET

Author: Mads Kristensen.

Setting a long cache on static resources is one of the first steps on optimising a website. This article demonstrates some code for fingerprinting resources and URL rewriting in order to serve the new content before the cache expires.

RHEL / OpenJDK – Performance Tuning

Author: Shane K Johnson.

JBoss Data Grid in RedHat Linux benefits from tuning for optimal performance. This short article has three techniques for improving networking, memory, and garbage collection. They are applicable to data grids or any distributed system that stores a lot of data.

Increase your site performance: Load external Javascript files after Page load

Author: Chitwi Malek.

One of the first things we look at when optimising page speed is moving elements like javascript to load after main content. This short tutorial covers coding social buttons and external widgets using jQuery.getScript function to load and execute external javascript files.

Apache Hive goes fully native on Windows

Author: Dj Walker-Morgan.

Apache Hive’s latest version, 0.10.0, has native support for Windows. This eliminates the requirement of installing cygwin in order to run in this OS. H-online has a brief article explaining this version’s features.

Faster Websites: Crash Course on Web Performance

Author: Ilya Grigorik.

Iilya Grigorik of Google’s Make The Web Fast team gave a marathon 3 hour workshop at Devoxx 2012 in an attempt to cover all aspects of web speed and performance. If you have a few hours and would like a comprehensive understanding of factors affecting webspeed, these are the videos for you. Slides are available separately if you would like to skim through.