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So you’ve decided that the limiting factor on the performance of your application is disc I/O. The rate at which data is read and written to and from the discs in your dedicated server. It’s time to follow the I/O path from the OS, down to the volume level, down to the individual disc, for a world of adventure…

Optimise the web application!

If we reduce the number of I/O requests in the first place from your application we can free up space for the other demanding activities we can’t change.

Start by looking at the level of logging that is being performed by your application. Is it necessary? could we turn it down for all those times that we aren’t doing debugging?

In your database, use indexes to access data blocks rather than bulk scans – this will generate fewer read requests.

Cluster hot data blocks together – this will generate fewer disc head seeks.

Add RAM

In a web server you can often never have enough RAM. The more you have, the more will be allocated to cacheing of data in memory, which will in turn reduce the number of requests that reach the discs.

Increasing RAM also has the effect of increasing the percentage used for dirty buffers so it helps conglomerate writes as well.

In the event that a server has a requirement for more RAM than is available, it will eventually start swapping out the data from memory onto the discs. Essentially – the discs start to act as RAM. Since the discs are an order of magnitude slower this swapping causes a severe performance hit to the server.

RAM is cheap these days so add it liberally.

Batter backed write cache

Use a battery backed write cache for applications that perform an intensive number of writes to a single location. This will reduce the number of writes that physically hit the disc.

A battery backed write cache will also help with transaction processing on an ACID database. This will hide the write latency.

Multiple volumes
Try splitting the work load over different physical volumes. For example, have separate volumes for small databases, log files, user data, etc. Or put the file system journal on another disc.

More discs
Each physical disc has limits on the rate at which data can be accessed and moved in or out. The more discs you have the more I/O capacity you have. You just have to make sure the best RAID configuration is selected:

RAID 0 will have the best read/write performance (but no data safety!) RAID 10 is the next best RAID 1 characteristics: Write performance is slightly less than a single disc Linear read performance only good with good OS read ahead Read performance otherwise can scale as requests split over drives

RAID 5 characteristics:
Decent read performance Write performance is only good when writing entire strides (i.e. bulk data writes) Database performance is terrible RAID 5 when degraded will have terrible performance RAID 6 great when reliability is everything.

Ensure that you have sufficient bus bandwidth to the discs
Some technology selection tips:
PCI-E or PCI-X Point to Point (SAS, SATA) will be better than a shared bus (SCSI LVD, IDE) Two IDE devices on the same cable will suck Increase the individual disc speed, higher the RPM the better If data safety does not matter, turn on the disc write-back caches

Using some or all of these suggestions, you should be able to generate significant improvements on your server and remove the I/O bottleneck.

I was having a ton of problems with my computer, and I had no idea what was wrong. It really started to slow down after a while.

I even bought one of the big name-brand anti-virus suites, and it didn’t do anything to stop the countless errors I had.

I kept getting errors every time I tried to watch a movie or a video online. My computer told me to go download drivers or update my software or Internet browser just to watch a silly YouTube video. And I didn’t have any time to be mucking around the Internet trying to find drivers or whatever strange stuff I needed.

With my luck, I’d download the wrong thing and end up breaking my computer even more.

I looked around for a driver finder, but all I could find was more confusing Web sites that didn’t help me find anything I needed.

Eventually I found a few software reviews that pointed me toward Driver Cure, something I’d never heard of before. The reviews said all I had to do was download it and it would download drivers for me and take the headache out of using my computer.

I was pretty skeptical, but I didn’t want to fight with my computer anymore and would happily gamble a few bucks to get some peace of mind.

I downloaded it, let it install and turned it on automatic updates, then I went outside for a walk.

When I came back, my computer was fixed! Needless to say, I spent the rest of the day watching kittens on YouTube and old Saturday Night Live skits on Hulu. I’d never been so happy with a wasted day!

Check out this Driver Cure review, it’s the one that pointed me in the right direction. Happy surfing!

Developers for mobile phone applications have started to make applications that work with the browser. The reason is that there is an advantage to making one application that can work with a variety of phones and phone platforms versus porting the application to each individual platform and device. If accessed on the web, it can reach a far larger market. While there are these advantages, there are also some limitations to consider.

First, the developer must make sure the phone works on all browsers. At some point in time there will be a variety of competing mobile browsers just like it is on the desktop. The developer must constantly test the mobile application in each of these after an update to make sure that the software continues to work correctly.

There is some huge risk in having a web only application or a phone. What happens if a manufacturer or phone company blocks the application or site the application is hosted on. So far, this has already happened to certain companies and certain sites. A company could change their browser so these applications do not work at all. While it doesn’t seem user friendly, this is a practice that will most likely continue. If you don’t like this as a user, stop supporting companies that do this.

Another issue to consider is that web based mobile applications need a constant internet connection. For many in areas with good wireless coverage this isn’t much of an issue. The problem is that at times there could be poor connectivity meaning that an application that is installed on the phone at this point becomes superior. Some on their plans come with limited bandwidth. These users might not want to risk going over their bandwidth and might prefer to use installed applications instead.

While there are these limitations, it seems that developing for the browser versus the platform will be easiest in the long run especially as more mobile platforms become popular.

Thinking about trying free web page designs for your organization or business website project? One thing is certain-there are plenty of free website design options out there, from website templates to free or advertising-supported website hosting services that come with built-in design software.

But more importantly than the relative abundance of free web page designs out there is the cold hard fact that they are simply not a good option for your growing website (and here’s why)…

Free Web Page Designs Come Across As Amateurish.

The last thing you want for your business or organization as you strive to go live on the web is to have a website that your visitors won’t take seriously. A good majority of website visitors will are really quite web-savvy these days. They can spot a “free template” style site from a mile away due to a number of telltale signs. The bottom line here is that if your visitors know that you are using a free site-and most will be able to tell-then, they probably will question your resources and staying power within your unique industry in the first place.

Free Website Designs Are Still Difficult To Work With.

Many equate free and do-it-yourself type websites with being quick and easy to establish. Again, this just isn’t the case at all. While there are a few services out there than can guide you through the process as you fill in the blanks, these sites aren’t able to be customized and designed in a versatile, customized way. And for the free web page designs that you might want to try customizing yourself, this is a possibility, but learning the ins and outs of HTML, CSS, and PHP can be very challenging.

Using Free Web Templates Creates Duplicate Sites.

There are only so many different free website templates in circulation. While the odds of your competitors ending up with the same exact design as you are probably slim, the fact of the matter is that there will be others using the same design. After all, they’re free and available to everyone-not just you alone. Having the same exact site design as someone else is just not a very good idea…especially if your visitors or customers find out.

So, what’s the alternative to free web page designs then? Well, for starters, you might give some serious consideration to using a basic entry-level design option from a well-regarded web design expert. We can usually work with even tight budgets-and more importantly-save you money compared to the long term costs of not succeeding with free web page designs.

What is ARBIL?

Asset and Risk Based INFOSEC lifecycle.

To implement a comprehensive security plan in I.T. and strategies for risk management.

What is CIA?

Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability

Confidentiality- making sure your data is available to only those allowed.

Integrity- making sure your data has not been altered in any way. Think bank transactions or chemical formulas.

Availability- making sure your data is available. Hackers often use denial of services attacks to bring down your servers or networks by overloading them with packets.

Hackers use attack trees to determine every possible entrance into your networks. This can be through modems connected to your network, routers, switches, and application vulnerabilities, almost anything connected to your internet.

Make it difficult to determine your OS, which hackers use for Banner Grabbing. This is a simple fix that many systems administrators leave.

Change your banner to display a security warning.

Many people have difficulty understanding security processes alone implementing solutions.

What is SMIRA? Simple methodology for INFOSEC based risk assessment.

Risk management is the practice and process of identifying threats and vulnerabilities to assets. This helps making the correct decisions to implement the necessary safeguards to help your organization carry out its mission.

Organizations should look at threats, vulnerabilities, assets and safeguards.

Risk Assessment

The goal is to have a list of your critical assets. Critical in understanding mission, objectives and operations and what if scenarios.

Then to implement safeguards to protect those assets.

Vulnerability Assessment

This is when you look for vulnerabilities in existing applications and determine there severity. The vulnerabilities will be rated. This includes physical security, web application reviews, policy and procedure reviews, host assessments and OS reviews, and vulnerability scans.

Threat Assessment

This is the process, of identifying existing and potential threats to assets and environments. This will also be based on severity.Where can threats come from? Disgruntled employees, script kiddies, hackers, crackers, foreign governments, and your competition. You can look for threat indicators in your server, logs, CCTV, intrusion detection systems like SNORT. http://www.snort.org

What can threats cause?

Loss of business

Death

Financial loss

Corruption of data.

Inability to work, servers down or running slowly.

Confidentiality issues.

What are assets?

User IT Operations

Staff

Connectivity

Documentation

Security Systems

Third parties

Paper

Files

Media, like disk, CD’s and USB drives.

File, Web, EMAIL, Storage, Application servers

Anything of value to the company.

Hackers like to get there hands on all information no matter how unimportant it may seem it can be used to filter out more information.

How do you protect yourself against threats and protect your assets?

Have policies and procedures in place.

Employee awareness of security issues.

Software security in place

Hardware security in place.

Physical security.

Environmental Security. I.e. water level sensors.

Communication security- to protect your phone lines, and PBX systems.

Personnel security.

There is a lot of software on the internet that allows even technically challenged people to run scans on your systems to try to crack them. Anybody that knows how to search Google can easily find such tools. The way the Internet is evolving and more and more people joining the Internet the security risks increase.

Attackers gain information on your systems by doing Domain Lookups with Whois. Port scans using many available tools to find out what you’re running and then do internet searches to find exploit code to crack your systems. Once they find out what applications you’re running it’s only a matter of time before they can crack your systems if you are not protected.

Attackers like to get information on your Domain Names, IP addresses, then they will scan your network looking for live hosts. This can be accomplished with tools like NMAP by Fyodor http://www.nmap.com . By using a tool like NMAP you can send UDP, ICMP, and TCP packets. This is done to identify host by looking at responses.

At this point attackers find out what applications are being used, or any information the host is willing to give out. The more services you have running the more opportunities for someone to remotely exploit your hosts. This can be very time consuming for the attacker. The goal is to find out what OS platforms are being run. Are they Unix, Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS? From here it easy much easier for someone to look for shellcode to use against your system.

Proper hosting of a website is very important in ensuring uninterrupted flow of your online services. Therefore, you should choose your web host very carefully and make sure the package you are buying is most suited to your needs and budget.

There are different kinds of web hosting services offered by companies worldwide. In the following paragraphs, each of these services are explained briefly:

Shared Web Hosting

It is, invariably, the most popular choice amongst online businesses. In shared hosting, a number of websites are hosted on the same server, which is usually managed by the provider. This means, clients have limited access to their servers – they can host their website but do not have the privilege of using custom web applications that come with the server. Although it is one of the most inexpensive website hosting options, websites on a shared server always end up getting affected by other sites that are sharing their resources on the server.

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Hosting is a very reliable and expensive hosting service, usually sought after by big businesses or companies that are running comprehensive ecommerce portals or financial websites that generate a huge amount of traffic. When you opt for a dedicated server, you lease a whole server for your website. It is a highly flexible option because as a customer, you have full control over the server. You can choose hardware, connection configuration, software, and operating system, as per your likes/dislikes or specific requirements.

Virtual Private Server

The VPS has, of late, grown in popularity amongst web hosting services. A number of companies are opting for VPS over dedicated server as it is cheaper and quite flexible. This kind of hosting works on virtual servers using same server resources but having the capability of a dedicated server. It can be categorized as the middle path between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. It is a preferable option with businesses that are at a crucial growth juncture.

Email Hosting

It is a very basic level hosting service wherein a customer buys the package only to run email services for his business. Laden with a range of enhanced features, email hosting enhances the ability of emailing and tracking, which is an important need for every business today.

Whether it is shared, dedicated or virtual private servers, Aussie Web Host serves as your favorite destination for all your website hosting needs in Australia. The company offers highly reliable and cost-effective web hosting services to a diverse clientele.

According to Wikipedia (which itself is a Web 2.0 application)

“Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. With these advanced capacities, a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, are evolving. As emphasized in Wiki’s definition the most prominent feature of Web 2.0 applications is the ability to have interaction and collaboration among users.

Some of the most prominent Web 2.0 sites would include Myspace, which rumor has it receives an amazing 50,000,000 plus hits per day, Facebook and YouTube. Those are some of the well known sites but there are also millions of others that allow for the user collaboration including blogs, forums, and the social networking sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg.

What is really great about the Web 2.0 applications is the fact that they can help your online business, help you get more traffic and the best part of all, you can do it for free.

You can post links back to your website and post reviews about your business, you can elicit feedback and promote yourself or your business in a myriad of different ways. It’s just a matter of how creative can you get. You can start discussions in forums, start a blog to promote your business and submit your site and others to the social networking sites.

Essentially as you get more and more people to see, hear, learn about and even discuss your business, the more chance you have at getting more and more traffic. And the key to any business be it online or a brick and mortar shop is to attract more and more customers. That is why using the power of Web 2.0 can benefit your business beyond the normal advertising means.

The boundaries of Web 2.0 are only limited by your own imagination.

As a developer and a tester, I’ve always been on the lookout for good tools and methods for keeping track of bugs, issues, and incidents that occur with software development. Needless to say, there are an enormous amount of tools out there for doing this. Just do a Google search on “bug tracking” and you’ll be amazed at the number of hits you’ll get. Many of these products are great and do a fantastic job, but for a cost.
If you’re going the open source route, then you’ll discover that there are many different products to choose from. But in many cases, the tool is either limited in functionality, is too complex to configure or use, or has no support. Among all these tools, there is one that stands out above the rest. This is the Mantis Bug Tracker! Mantis is an web based bug tracking system that utilizes a back end SQL database with a easy to use web interface. Mantis is an open source project on Sourceforge.net. Thus, Mantis is “free”! Now, before you start to run away with the “free = junk” mentality, you really ought to give Mantis a serious look. Here’s why:

First of all, Mantis has a huge user base. Lots of users means lots of support! The discussion forum on the web site is a great resource for getting answers to your questions.

The product has reached a mature state. When I started using Mantis 5 years ago, I thought it was great then! But now I’m REALLY impressed! The product continues to grow and be supported by the user community.
This has got to be one of the easiest installations that I’ve had the pleasure to experience. You call your ISP and have them turn on your MySQL server account. Then using your MySQL interface, you past in the SQL script for creating the database structure. You make a couple minor changes to one script file, and then you run the installer. Then BANG – you’re in!

Mantis is highly configurable. I once set up Mantis as a Service Request Tracking System – for keeping track of incoming service calls and requests for a PC Repair business. It worked great! The owner and technicians were highly impressed with being able to receive an email everytime a service request came in.

Mantis is available in 30 different languages with more on the way.
There are multiple filters for looking at the list of bugs in just about any order you want.

Mantis provides the ability to have the testers and users enter new bugs. An email is automatically sent to the person assigned as the project manager. The PM can then assign and prioritize the bug. The assignee receives an email with the assignment. When the bug has been fixed, the developer can flag it thus. And then the PM or QA can verify and close the bug. Multiple projects can be managed in a single database. A project can be flagged as public or private.

Graphs can be generated with the JPGraphs addon tool. (Also, an Open Source Project.)

The documentation on the web site is very extensive and includes user contributed notes.

AND I was totally impressed with the ability to save and export my bug reports into Word and Excel files.

The ART of Software Development in Mantis is in the fact that it was originally created as a MOIIN application. (The Mother Of Invention Is Necessity.) (And yes, I made up the acronym. ) The developer wanted a “free” application for tracking the bugs in his game development project. Finding none, he dove in and created Mantis. There was such a huge response to his efforts that he decided to rewrite and release Mantis to the public. And the fact that so many people are using Mantis speaks volumes about its usefulness.

Personally, I’ve spent a lot of hours pouring over a massive number of packages available for issue tracking. I always end up coming back to Mantis. The price can’t be beat. And for those who don’t want to install and configure a Mantis Bug Tracking System then they offer a “Hosted” plan for a minimum cost.

I foresee that Mantis will be around for a long time. And whenever I have influence on the decision of and use of a software bug tracking system then Mantis will be my choice!

If you are thinking that you will no longer have a chance to get a good quality site for your business in a low cost? Well, thankful that there is already a review site templates. The review site templates have the power to help you earn some serious income. Yes! That is the secret of the site templates. The moment they reached your site, it means that they already interested with your product.

The purpose of the site page is to give a little push to your visitor to convince them to buy your product. Your visitors are checking if your page will give them what they want. So, in short, your site page is really your bridge to either success or failure.

The review site template has its advantages, and we must know the 5 good things about review site templates to make sure that this really fits for our site:

1. It is affordable to use. Most of the page design now a day is expensive which makes other online marketers to lose their chance to have a good quality site pages. Well good thing that there are review site templates that are available today.

2. For those who are having a hard time to customize, the review site template is the best choice for you, because it is easy to customize. In just 10 minutes, you can already have your site run through the internet.

3. If you are worry if your site will have the same as the other site, well, you are wrong, because these review site template have the add-on features that you may use to come up something unique and stand out from the others.

4. Having a cheap site templates does not mean that you will have a good and professional design, well, you are wrong. These templates have a professional look and with good quality that fits for your business. Your site must look professional and with credibility to attract more visitors.

5. Using the site templates take the guesswork out of the equation. With these templates, you do not need to go back and forth to your designer, who may not fully understand what you want to see in your site.

You must know by now how you will you make your site attractive to your visitors and convince them to purchase or make a deal with you. Remember that your site template may help you to achieve the success you want for your business, so you must make it look professional like you are as a business marketer.

Executive Summary

The Internet and the Web continue to evolve to deliver new customer experiences and increased application utility. The label “Web 2.0,” while imprecise, signifies the newest and best examples of this evolutionary process.Organizations are now adopting these Web 2.0 technologies and design methods to enable the creation of richer and more responsive interactions. But to be effective, the resulting applications must also be significantly more complex than traditional Web sites, complicating performance management and imposing new requirements on performance measurement tools.

The Web Application Landscape

The Internet and the Web have become the primary vehicle for business communications, evolving to subsume and replace older technologies. As software technologies exploit steady advances in the Internet hardware platform, the Web continues to evolve to deliver new user experiences and increased application utility. The most advanced example of the Web becoming a platform is the rich Internet application (RIA), reflects the gradual transition of Web applications from the simple thin-client Web browser to a richer distributed-function paradigm that behaves more like the desktop in a client/server model.

Measuring RIA Performance

This architecture complicates performance measurement, whose goal is to understand the customer’s experience. In an RIA, the time to complete a Web page download may no longer correspond to something a user perceives as important, because (for example) the client engine may be prefetching some of the downloaded content for future use. Standard tools that measure the time for Web page downloads to complete can record misleading data for RIAs. To implement RIAs successfully, enterprises must re-evaluate their approach to performance management. Instead of relying on the definition of physical Web pages to drive the subdivision of application response times, RIA developers or tool users must break the application into logical pages. Measurement tools must recognize meaningful application milestones or markers that signal logical boundaries of interest for reporting, and subdivide the application’s response time accordingly.

The Importance of Web Performance Management

What does Web application performance mean to you? Most business executives would evaluate the success of a Web application by looking at business performance metrics such as revenue, costs, and customer satisfaction. Because an application may be created to serve customers, partners, members of an organization, or employees, the relative importance of those metrics may vary. For any Web application, effectiveness means simply fulfilling the planned design and delivery objectives, delivering online experiences that lead to satisfied customers, and so meeting the intended business performance goals.

Common Goals, Divided Responsibilities

In many organizations, responsibility for these four aspects of effectiveness is divided among four groups or departments.

Divide and Conquer:

Business – experts provide the content or specify the behaviors that are the site’s purpose (Utility).

Design and usability – professionals specialize in making it easy for customers to navigate the site (Clarity).

Site developers – build the site in ways that determine download speed (Responsiveness).

IT staff – manage the systems that keep the site up and running (Availability) and maintain a consistent level of performance (Responsiveness).

Measurement Challenges of Web 2.0

The characteristics of Web 2.0 applications highlighted earlier-the network as a platform, collaborative environment, social networking, mashups, and rich media interfaces-create several additional challenges for all measurement tools. In increasing degree of complexity, these are:

o Measuring an increasingly diverse customer community
o Measuring the quality of collaborative interactions, in which customers both upload and download information.
o Measuring applications that incorporate a much richer variety of media and interfaces.
o Measuring application phases that no longer correspond to one (or more) HTML pages
o Reporting data in ways that provide insight into Web 2.0 applications.

Getting the Right Data

To sum up the importance of these issues, consider the popular saying coined by Tom DeMarco: You can’t control what you don’t measure. Measuring the wrong things, or basing key management decisions on reports that contain incomplete data, is as bad, if not worse, than not measuring at all. So it’s not wise to measure Web 2.0 applications using only the tools and approaches developed for traditional Web sites. Inaccurate data undermines the effectiveness of any program of systematic performance management and causes performance-tuning skills and resources to be applied in ways that are not optimal. It can also lead to unproductive interdepartmental conflicts and disputes over service-level agreements with internal or external service providers when staff question the accuracy of the data, or discover discrepancies in data from different sources.

Keynote Web Performance Management Solutions

Success in every one of these five performance management activities depends crucially on an organization’s ability to gather and report meaningful, timely, and accurate measurement data with the focus on the right metrics. Since a key idea of Web 2.0 is enhancing the user’s experience, it is vital to measure actual customer experience proactively.

Measuring the Diverse Customer Community

On Web 2.0 sites, personalization options allow customers to tailor their experience of a site to their individual preferences, and sites are carefully designed to download and display contents efficiently and successfully in all major browsers. Because customers’ experience depends on their Internet connectivity, sites may even adjust their content based on the browser’s connection speed. Measurement data must reflect this diversity.

Measuring Upload and Download Performance

In traditional Web applications, customers consume content, so all performance measurement efforts have focused on download times as the key metric. But as Web 2.0 applications add collaboration and social networking features, customers also supply content. To ensure the quality of a customer’s experience, it’s therefore necessary to measure and report upload performance as well.

For example, the user of a collaborative application might navigate to a product or member directory, complete a login or authentication dialog,search for a certain subject or interest area, browse the results, select a particular area of interest, proceed to an upload page or dialog, complete a browse dialog to select content to be uploaded from their laptop or desktop, entering some additional descriptive metadata as appropriate for the application, and click the Upload button. Throughout this interaction download activities are minimal, and may respond rapidly. But if, after all this work, the upload stage is painfully slow, or fails altogether, because of congestion at the server end, that customer may be lost forever.

For an organization needing to measure and ensure the quality of its customers’ experience when contributing content to a collaborative or social networking application.

Conclusion

When considering the need for Web testing and measurement, it can be tempting to view a Web application simply as a collection of Web pages. Adopting that simplifying view makes performance measurement and reporting tasks easier. But doing so ignores the dimension of Web performance most affected by Web 2.0, and maybe the most important feature of a Web application-the paths taken by Web users. For every Web application, a user’s ability to navigate smoothly through a relatively small set of business transactions-the “money paths”-is the key to business success. It is only by completing these key transactions that visitors are converted into customers, triers into buyers. Therefore, in addition to tracking key performance indicators like conversion rate, most organizations consider it essential to identify, track, and measure their key business transactions. By doing so, they can better understand and improve each application’s conversion rate-the second key to site effectiveness and therefore the health of the business.