Recently we've been doing a significant amount of performance work preparing to take the ONEsite platform to the next level.  We've crossed a number of incredible milestones recently (total number of users on the platform, amount of new user generated content per day, amount of data imported from other platforms, etc.) and have been proactively tackling existing performance issues whilst planning for the next waves of growth.

While there are a number of great blogs discussing how to increase performance, nothing beats a well-written book (except for personal experience, of course).  That being said, I've been particularly impressed with two books recently.

First off is Steve Souders "High Performance Websites for Front-End Engineers."  This book details how to improve the client-side performane of a website.  This involves everything from gzipping stylesheets, to minifying javascript, to parallelizing browser connections to increase performance for modern Internet connections.  Steve works at Yahoo! as "Chief Performance Yahoo!" and definitely knows his stuff.  The book is well written and filled with things you may not have realized if you mostly pay attention to the backend side of things.

Next up is the 2nd Edition of "High Performance MySQL."  I simply cannot say enough wonderful things about this book.  The 2nd Edition is twice as thick as the original and every single chapter seems to be both relevant and insightful.  The book covers everything from replication setups to advanced MySQL storage engines to Sphinx and full-text search indexing.  Here at ONEsite we are very fond of MySQL, Sphinx and all the other great LAMP technologies that make up the foundation of the ONEsite platform.

Great things are ahead!