I was lucky enough to attend PyCon-AU recently and one talk in particular highlighted the process of web server optimisation.

Graham Dumpleton’s add-in talk Web Server Bottlenecks And Performance Tuning available on YouTube (with the majority of PyCon-AU talks)

The first big note at the beginning is that the majority of the delay in user’s perception of a website is caused by the browser rendering the page. Though not covered in the talk for those that haven’t used the tool YSlow (for Firefox and Chrome) or Google’s Developer