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Monitoring your back-end for speed and profit by Andy 'Bob' Brockhurst

At the BBC we are preparing for the some big events in the coming year (the Olympics amongst them), as we don't have to cash to splash on new hardware in the current economic climate and our frozen license fee. The BBC runs approximate 300 websites all contained with bbc.co.uk and running on the same hardware. This means that a spike in traffic on /weather affects /iplayer and all other sites hosted on our platform. This talk will show some of the things we've been doing to benchmark our platform (the PHP, ZF portion anyway) and highlight poor performing sections of our site and address them. I will explain some of the tools we've written and technologies we've used to achieve this on a relatively short timescale with limited budget. This will cover our experience of using XHProf for the first time and augmenting Zend Framework to generate HAR (Http Archive) format files to expose the service calls our platform makes and how we've approached optimising them.

February 24, 2012