Interesting observations/thoughts on web operations collected from a few sessions at Velocity conference 2010 [ most are from a talk by Theo Schlossnagle , author of “Scalable internet architectures†] Optimization Don’t over optimize. Could take away precious resources away from critical functions. Don’t scale early. Planning for more than 10 times the load you currently have or are planning to support might be counter-productive in most cases. RDBMS is fine until you really need something which can’t fit on 2 or 3 servers. Optimize performance on single node before you optimize and re-architect a solution for horizontal scalability. Tools Tools are what a master craftsman makes… tools don’t make a craftsman a master. Tools can never solve a problem, its correct use does. Master the tools which need to be (could be ) used in production at short notice. Looking for man page for these tools durin