Performance 101 for Small Web Apps

Handling application growth in the early days of a project does not necessarily require jumping straight into replication, sharding or the cloud. Many small or budget operations don’t have administration level access to their MySQL server and possess very finite resources.

With a few simple development techniques and rules of thumb for web app tuning, you may get an extra few years out of your shared hosting or single/dual server environment. We’ll look at:

• Find an app’s bottleneck and solve it from the application side or the server side.
• Quickly find your slow queries without access to the slow query log, and apply a few common tactics for tuning them.
• Solve the pagination scaling problem, or: “How to browse large amounts of data the smart way”.
• Get familiar with cool MySQL specific SQL functions that you may not have got around to trying out yet.
• When to use external caching solutions like memcached, and how to tell what data is worth caching in the first place.
• When to commit sins in the real world: De-normalizing your schema, using way to many queries per page request and lying to your users.
• Understand query concurrency and locking issues on the server, and how to avoid such problems.