self-enlightenment

I was fortunate to get the opportunity to lead a team that re-engineered our bizrate.com and shopzilla.com websites from scratch on a new technology stack.  One of the driving forces was to improve the performance of our sites.  We knew that in order to make performance a first-order priority we had to design it into the architecture of the site.

We first began speaking about the bottom line benefits at Velocity 2009.  Since then, we wanted to share some of the technical details about how we built our new site infrastructure and some of the techniques we used to measure then improve performance.

I got the chance to deliver a presentation at a number of Souther California Java Users Groups.  We’ve chosen to share it here: Shopzilla – Performance By Design

Some other useful references for high performance sites:

• Steve Souder’s site provides a wealth of information and resources
• High Scalability provides some interesting insights into other sites’ architectures
• Yahoo! Developer Network Exceptional Performance blog and the Google Page Speed site

Something else we’ve learned is that if you take your eye off the ball, performance will regress.  As we’ve spent the last year adding more and more features to our sites, we’ve given back some of our performance gains.  We recently embarked on a project to get some of that back and add more automtated performance measurement.  Stay tuned to our Shopzilla Tech Blog for more info.