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I don't get it, where's the class on multi-tier server architecture? Load-balancing techniques? Server scaling? Database / backend performance best practices? I appreciate the focus on the front-end, and YSlow best practices, but I'm surprised that this kind of class is completely neglecting the backend - which is just as, if not more important, for scaling a major production website.

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Actually the entire premise of Steve's book is that he was in charge of performance/latency at Yahoo, and started out looking for issues in the backend.

But when he measured end-user latency, he realized that all the issues were in the front end. It doesn't make sense to start tweaking 100,000 lines of C++ code to shave 1 ms from the backend response time when you're taking 200-300ms to load JavaScript and such.

I think this is probably a common performance characteristic at large companies; perhaps not small ones. At small ones you probably have a database bottleneck. But at companies Yahoo/Google the backend engineers have generally optimized things quite a lot (partly because that kind of work is rewarded), and there's a lot of flab in the front end.

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