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.

Performance with Javascript Objects

Author: Panagiotis Tsalaportas. Do you use new String() to create new strings rather than a primitive value? Of course! Do you know why? This detailed article discusses why on the surface you should use primitives yet in practice Object Strings are the way to go. A number of tests to examine performance differences are conducted using a range of methods against the test variables.

The fork/join framework in java 7

Author: Patrick Peschlow. New in Java 7 is ForkJoinPool. This new executor service differs by employing work-stealing to enable efficient processing of sub-tasks. This alleviates competition situations that can arise from Java 5’s ExecutorService.

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

Author: Jay Janssen. A large database size can impact performance and it’s indexes potentially consume a significant amount of space. Locating unused indexes for culling by collecting statistics on Percona Server is easy using the User Statistics Patch, as Jay Janssen has done in this article.

Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech

Author: Sean Gallagher. “4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President.” Building a platform on tested, not-invented-here, technologies was the strategy used by team Obama to provide centralised services to the field. With the RESTful API Narwhal providing the framework to Amazon’s mySQL-based relational database system, data was centralised and accessible to all levels of people on the campaign.

Liking Performance

Author: Stoyan Stefanov. One of the most popular pages on the web today is the Facebook Like button social plugin. This facebook engineer writes about increasing performance of this ubiquitous little page to cut load time in half.

Efficiently compressing dynamically generated web content

Author: John Graham-Cumming. Dynamically-generated web content is a staple in these days of personalised content and instant updates. Compression using generic gzip encoding can be used to increase performance of these sites. This article explores the use of dictionaries to further reduce the size and speed of compressed pages.

Performance Tuning Windows 2012: Power Consumption and Performance

Author: Ard-Jan Barnas. Balancing performance against power consumption of servers can be a daunting task. Ard-Jan clearly navigates the situation with helpful tips on monitoring usage and performance of the processor running Windows 2012.

Using NGINX, PHP-FPM+APC and Varnish to make WordPress Websites fly

Author: Tobias Baldauf. This is a great article for anyone wanting to stand up a decently performing WordPress server. All steps and configurations are covered to get you up and running quickly. “This setup will easily let you serve hundreds of thousands of users per day, including brief peaks of up to 100 concurrent users on a ~15$/month machine with only 2 cores and 2GB of RAM.”