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 Tools (ctrl-alt-I in Chrome), both tools will …

I've got a sprint scheduled now for PyCon 2009. I can only be there for the first day of sprints. If there's enough interest, we can probably find a way to sprint earlier during some of the open space session; or it can continue after I'm gone.

PyCon 2010 will be in Atlanta, GA, which is a lot closer to home, but not close enough that I can avoid lodging expenses.