Web site performance is an expansive topic. Like just about any aspect of Web development, a career can be made out of becoming knowledgeable on performance. A career can even be made out of becoming a Drupal performance expert (David Strauss is doing just that). I find for single-server sites there are 4 must-dos for performance. These are the biggest bang-for-the-buck performance improving techniques.

A Common Gateway Interface Script (CGI Script) is a small program written in a language such as Perl, Tcl, C or C++, it functions as the glue between HTML pages and other programs on a web server.

For example, a CGI script would allow search data entered on a Web page to be sent to the DBMS (database management system) for lookup. It would also format the results of that search as an HTML page and send it back to the user. The CGI script resides in the server and obtains the data from the user via environment variables that the Web server makes available to it.

Pay per impressions is a typical referral link/banner ad arrangement where the site wanting to purchase advertising space pays the hosting site for each time it displays the ad. Typically, prices are set per one thousand exposures. Software is added to the hosting web server to track the number of impressions displayed.

Further Reading

This article is about the standalone LevelTen hit counter. If you would like information about our complete software suite please read LevelTen site engine. The LevelTen hit counter is a top rated web counter statistics package available for free download, it features a one-of-a-kind flash rich media reporter that quickly generates hundreds of real-time graphical web traffic reports. It is powered by PHP MYSQL scripts that install in minutes on virtually any webserver.

"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge."
- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

The world wide web (www) is a network of computers storing interlinked hypertext, hypermedia, and other files. It is called a web because of the extensive parallel linking that goes on between different websites. Each web site has a domain with a URL which corresponds to a file in its memory. Others can link to this file using the URL system. An example is http://www.leveltendesign.com/wiki/world-wide-web

A Web Server is a computer with special software to host web pages and web applications. Web server's traditional function has been to serve static HTML (and more recently XML) pages. As the world wide web has become more functional, i.e. e-commerce, dynamic content, and collaborative software, increasing emphasis is placed on a server's ability to host web applications.

Types of Web Servers:

Many different web servers are in use on the world wide web. Some of the more popular ones are: