Wait For It gives users a timely response even when the underlying WSGI application isn't very timely. Wait For It does this by launching an extra thread for each incoming request. If the wrapped application responds in a timely manner (before time_limit) the response is simply passed on.

If the response doesn't come back before the time limit, the user is given a response page that asks them to wait. The response page contains Javascript that will re-check the status of the page, and when the page is ready it will reload the page.

Wackamole is an application that helps with making a cluster highly available. It manages a bunch of virtual IPs, that should be available to the outside world at all times. Wackamole ensures that a single machine within a cluster is listening on each virtual IP address that Wackamole manages. If it discovers that particular machines within the cluster are not alive, it will almost immediately ensure that other machines acquire these public IPs. At no time will more than one machine listen on any virtual IP. Wackamole also works toward achieving a balanced distribution of number IPs on the machine within the cluster it manages.

These rules are the key to speeding up your web pages. They've been tested on some of the most popular sites on the Internet and have successfully reduced the response times of those pages by 25-50%.
The key insight behind these best practices is the realization that only 10-20% of the total end-user response time is spent getting the HTML document. You need to focus on the other 80-90% if you want to make your pages noticeably faster. These rules are the best practices for optimizing the way servers and browsers handle that 80-90% of the user experience.

One of the more common security problems plaguing Web servers is cross-site scripting. Cross-site scripting is a server-side vulnerability that is often created when rendering user input as HTML. Cross-site scripting attacks can expose sensitive information about the users of the Web site. In order to help mitigate the risk of cross-site scripting, a new feature has been introduced in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. This feature is a new attribute for cookies which prevents them from being accessed through client-side script. A cookie with this attribute is called an HTTP-only cookie. Any information contained in an HTTP-only cookie is less likely to be disclosed to a hacker or a malicious Web site. The following example is a header that sets an HTTP-only cookie.

An activity diagram to describe the resolution of the response status code, given various headers.

Here are a few notes on how to configure operating systems and write code to support thousands of clients. The discussion centers around Unix-like operating systems, as that's my personal area of interest, but Windows is also covered a bit.

The Pound program is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively.

Heres my ultimate list of Apache .htaccess code snippets and examples that I use all the time. I tried to keep them extremely minimalistic and to the point. The focus here is not to explain Apache .htaccess or httpd.conf, this is a list of best-practice .htaccess code snippets for specific functions.

Red Hat Content Accelerator is a kernel-based, multi-threaded, extremely high performance HTTP server with the ability to serve both static and dynamic data. TUX is also an architecture for kernel-accelerated network services.