Benchmarking, performance tuning and server administration

No site exists in a bubble: there are web server configuration changes, development tools, communication tools, and hopefully performance issues to consider in most every project. Over the years we have gained many skills related to the stack of applications used to build sites.

Site benchmarking

The first step in improving performance of a site is to get a baseline measure of the current performance. We work with you to determine which actions on your site are perform below acceptable levels and then we develop repeatable load tests to measure those specific scenarios. Once benchmarking is complete, we can move to performance tuning.

Basic performance tuning

Once a site has been benchmarked, tuning can begin. Basic performance tuning can be done quite quickly and often leads to dramatic improvements. Our team is experienced in using a variety of tools to improve raw server performance, making interface changes to optimize a site's theme for speed, and tuning server configurations to reduce load and speed content delivery to users. For many clients we have improved performance by 10 or 20 times with just a few hours of work.

Server administration

As part of providing website development services to customers we often need to provide server administration as well. This kind of administration is often related to configuration of Apache, MySQL, PHP and other related software, but we also have experience in building tools to reduce the amount of manual work necessary in maintaining servers.