NYCPHP Meetup

[leam]

Coffee is still kicking in, will try not to ramble...

Anyone have web performance and client dwell time on site metrics they
use to tune their apps to? In a conversation yesterday a friend
mentioned using Lighttpd and getting a 30% boost in request services per
second over Apache. In other areas I've looked at the performance of
NetBSD over Linux on low-end hardware and it raised the question of end
to end performance. 

Not a question of "can you make it more performant?" as that's easy to
answer. I'm looking at "Is there a web metric that makes it more viable
for a small start up to spend time maintaining non-mainstream software
collections than using standard tools like Apache, Linux, and
traditional servers"?

Another business aspect I need to consider is integration into
distributed tools. Similar to Amazon's S3, I'm pretty confident that the
future is in a highly distributed infrastructure for both the client and
provider. That amplifies standardization and performance; every extra
web hop adds transaction overhead and costs resources in bandwidth and
colo fees or the equivalent.

My target market is small businesses that need IT but technology is not
their business. I want to be able to sell them a performant solution
that actually solves issues for them and lets them get back to making
profit doing whatever they do. As I'm small too, in business terms if
not in girth, building the capbilities of large enterprises is not
within my resource limits. 

So I sit here on a chilly Saturday morning and ask questions for friends
I've never met for help with my business. I'm in my jammies, like many
of you, and looking to solve significant issues for fun and profit. Like
many of you I have visionary ideas and a bootstrap budget. Sometimes I
wonder if we choose technologies less for purely geeky reasons and
occasionally for the people it brings us into contact with. 

Leam