Apache Kafka - A high throughput distributed messaging system

Apache Kafka is publish-subscribe messaging rethought as a distributed commit log.

Fast

A single Kafka broker can handle hundreds of megabytes of reads and writes per second from thousands of clients.

Scalable

Kafka is designed to allow a single cluster to serve as the central data backbone for a large organization. It can be elastically and transparently expanded without downtime. Data streams are partitioned and spread over a cluster of machines to allow data streams larger than the capability of any single machine and to allow clusters of co-ordinated consumers

Durable

Messages are persisted on disk and replicated within the cluster to prevent data loss. Each broker can handle terabytes of messages without performance impact.

Distributed by Design

Kafka has a modern cluster-centric design that offers strong durability and fault-tolerance guarantees.

Yslow is an awesome tool to check UI performance

Yslow is what I would consider to be an essential tool to any SEO or developer’s toolbox. I am a big fan of tools and methods that help you improve the structure and architecture of your website, and YSlow is the perfect addition to FireFox to help you analyze, dissect, and improve a your website’s structure and load times.

After installing the YSlow plugin on FireFox, simply run it on any domain and it gives you the following breakdown:

YSlow gives your site a composite grade based on a total of 22 different contributing metrics. Each metric is analyzed in order to help you crack down on page load times and code structure of your website. YSlow will give you a grade on each metric to help you determine which areas of your site need attention.

As you can see on the screenshot, when I ran YSlow on xkcd.com – it scored an F for “Content Delivery Network”.  From here, you click on the grade and YSlow gives you a breakdown of which components contributed to the score and a link on how to fix them at the bottom if you’re not sure how.

I personally rely on YSlow often to get a snapshot of client webpages. YSlow is a great way analyze things like http requests and how css/javascript are performing.

Especially considering its a free tool, there really isn’t a reason you shouldn’t be using YSlow!