"Performance" or "Why is my website so slow?"

Whether you're young or old, experienced or untested, a man or a woman, you've probably experienced website performance problems. The excitement you feel as you bring up a beautiful, responsive new site can be quickly exhausted as your resources are spent much faster than you'd anticipated. All you can do is sit impotently by and watch as your server tries to keep things going by itself - its hard drives grinding themselves into molten lava and its fans screaming while they pump hot air of every orifice. Yeah, we've all been there before.

Well this month we're going to help you assess and avoid these kinds of problems. The next time your website is running slow, we want you to have the tools to figure out why, so you'll be able to jump right back in the mix and help your poor server out.

We'd like to have people talk about performance from the bottom up, so if you have tips for discovering system performance issues, database performance problems, framework gotchas, or HTML and Javascript speed-bumps, then please contact us to give a talk this month.

The Meeting Agenda

Socializing and Networking

5:45PM - 6:15PM

Drop in before the presentations to pick brains and rub elbows with other members. We'll also have the food set up so you can grab a bite before the main event begins. Please consider donating a few dollars to help cover the cost of food.

Intro
6:15PM ~ 6:20PM

Welcome, sponsor recognition, interesting upcoming events, miscellaneous babbling.

The Main Event
6:15PM ~ 7:45PM

Adam Tauno Williams (http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/): "The server is slow!"

Adam has been the jack-of-all-IT-trades at Morrison Industrial Equipment (http://www.morrison-ind.com/) for about 15 years - performing system and network administration to provide users with services utilizing a mostly open source application stack. He also doubles as an Informix and PostgreSQL DBA. In his free time he is a developer on the OpenGroupware project and lead developer of the MIT/X11 licensed Python implementation OpenGroupware Coils (http://sourceforge.net/projects/coils/).

The server is slow! That's nice... by why? And what does "slow" mean? Is it the network? "Everything looks fine." Fortunately for the unlucky system administrator (or is it application administrator these days?) even a default installation provides a robust toolbox for discovering what is going on under-the-hood. We'll cover a collection of those tools to determine both the why and the meaning of "slow". Meet strace, fuser, ss, and friends,and some tips on where to aim them.

Robert Bosse (https://www.meetup.com/grwebdev/members/37348812/): "Javascript Performance"

Robert is an IT Developer within the Global Business Services division (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/consulting/) of IBM (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/consulting/). He specializes in web and mobile technologies and is currentlyworking on websites and mobile applications for the Coca-Cola Co.Before joining “Big Blue”, he worked the front-end on websites for theState of Michigan and Michigan State University. His current technicalfocus is on Responsive Web Design and native Android development.

Mobile is the future! It’s critical to make sure that interactive web content is created in an efficient and optimized manner so as to not impact device performance. JavaScript is a common and powerful area where even small tweaks can make a substantial increase in efficiency. This talk will focus on common techniques and strategies to eliminate JavaScript performance bottlenecks and optimize all your projects, but especially mobile sites.

Michael Bopp (https://www.meetup.com/grwebdev/members/26335292/): "Caching with Varnish and Redis"

Mike works for Rapid Development Group (http://rapiddg.com/) in Grand Rapids and is a versatile implementer of web solutions, specializing in technologies both widespread, such as ASP.NET (http://asp.net/), and targeted, such as Progress. Currently Mike is focused on developing for the Drupal framework as well as using Objective-C to create iOS applications. Mike has completed significant projects for major mid-Michigan businesses such as Universal Forest Products, Viking Corporation, and Gordon Food Service.

Varnish (https://www.varnish-cache.org/) is used to optimize high traffic websites and provides the ability to scale up and conserve system resources. Most data driven web apps can benefit from Varnish, and the more processing your site requires, the more benefit there is in using a "caching HTTP reverse proxy" like Varnish. Another tool, Redis (http://redis.io/), assists in the caching of db queries for better site performance by reducing the amount of time spent communicating with a database.

Nic Jansma (http://nicj.net/): Using Your Browser to Improve Performance

Nic is an independent software developer focusing on high-performance websites, apps and games. After spending seven years in Seattle at Microsoft on the Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9/10 performance teams, he moved back to Grand Rapids and founded Wolverine Digital (http://wolverinedigital.com). Nic currently spends his time working on multiple websites, apps and games that he has independently developed.

The W3C's web-performance working group (http://www.w3.org/2010/webperf/) was created two years ago with the goal of giving web developers the tools they need to better understand the performance of their websites and to write more efficient applications. Several specifications are already built into today's modern browsers and web developers can and should be using them to make their websites perform better. We'll go over Navigation Timing, Resource Timing, User Timing, the Performance Timeline, Page Visibility, High Resolution Time and Efficient Script Yielding. You'll get a brief overview of what each spec does, why you should care about it, and how you can use it.

Post-Meeting Activities

Join other members for drinks and discussion at a local watering hole afterwards.