Who should attend: Webmasters and others involved in supporting a Web site; ISP operators who support proxy-caching servers; researchers and developers who want a detailed understanding of Web performance. You should be familiar with Web browsers and the use of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). You should also be comfortable with basic performance techniques such as caching.

What you will learn: The causes of poor performance and techniques for improving performance of the Web.

The World Wide Web has sometimes been referred to as the "World Wide Wait". What can content providers do to offer better response time to users and scale to large numbers of clients? Some techniques to be discussed include operating system and network overheads, server replication, image formats, and dynamic content.

There will also be discussion of performance from a client's perspective. Clients often direct their requests through intermediate servers that cache resources on behalf of a larger community. Without careful attention, they can themselves become a performance bottleneck. Proxy caches are one solution. You will gain an understanding of their effectiveness and how to use them. You will learn techniques for improving end-to-end latency, particularly over slow networks such as modems and wireless environments.

The tutorial ends with a discussion of evolving technologies and their impact on performance. Push technology is one example of how the use of the Web is evolving. Streaming media such as RealAudio also affect performance. We will discuss changes to the HTTP protocol (the HTTP/1.1 proposed standard which will permit a greater deal of flexibility in the use of persistent connections), content-encodings such as compression, and pipelined requests.

Fred Douglis is a principal technical staff member at AT&T Labs - Research. He has published papers on Web performance and is responsible for the AT&T Internet Difference Engine, a tool for tracking and viewing changes to resources on the Web. He has taught distributed computing at Princeton University and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Fred is the chair of the 1998 USENIX Technical Conference and on the program committee of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference.

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