Anyone with experience in optimising the performance of a website/ social network with user-generated content.
What are some of the things i must look out for from the client side and server side as well?
The important thing is to get the application working first - you can then worry about scaling and improving the performance.
Adhering to typical front-end performance optimisations such as:-
[list]
[]Http compression
[]Reducing the number of HTTP objects (such as merging CSS files into one, merging all JS into one file, using CSS image spirtes etc)
[]Minification of JS/CSS
[]Keeping CSS in the and moving the script(s) to just before the closing tag
[/list]
From a back-end server-side performance perspective, there are a few things you could do to improve website site speed, like caching content using Memcache (or similar). You could cache DB SELECT’s so that you DB server(s) aren’t hit unnecessarily and setting appropriate expiration times can help keep your cache relatively up to date.
If you have a specific site you want us to look at, please let us know.
What platform are you on?