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O'Reilly Velocity Conference Gathers Web Performance and Operations Experts

Top Experts in Web Performance and Operations Draw High Turnout
O'Reilly Velocity Conference Shows How to Achieve Website Speed and Reliability

Sebastopol, CA, July 16, 2009—The second year of the O'Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference drew more than 700 web developers and experts, a larger group than attended last year's, to San Jose June 22-24, 2009. They came to Velocity to pose their toughest questions to the people doing the best performance and operations work in the world.

"The fact that attendance has surpassed last year says something about the growing importance of this new field," said O'Reilly Media founder and CEO, Tim O'Reilly.

Conference co-chairs Steve Souders of Google and Jesse Robbins of OpsCode and O'Reilly Radar designed the three-day conference with dedicated tracks for both web performance and web operations. Among nearly 80 speakers were some of the most innovative minds at industry-leading companies. Keynote speakers included:

• Jonathan Heiliger of Facebook: "After the Click"
• Marissa Mayer of Google: "In Search of … A Better, Faster, Stronger Web"
• John Adams of Twitter: "Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site"
• Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of Mozilla: "On Responsiveness"
• Jake Brutlag of Google Search and Eric Schurman of Microsoft: "The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Searches"
• Phillip Dixon of Shopzilla: "Shopzilla's Site Redo - You Get What You Measure"

Evening events included the inaugural Spike Night, featuring Scott Ruthfield of Rooster Park Consulting, Chris Bissell of MySpace, and Ryan Nelson of Major League Baseball Advanced Media in a real-time shootout that demonstrated how high-traffic websites deal with massive increases in load, both expected and unexpected.

Among the announcements made at Velocity, Keynote Systems announced Keynote Transaction Perspective(R) 9.0, a greatly enhanced version of their flagship website monitoring service. Google launched a developer website designed to emphasize the importance of speed on the Web that includes tutorials, position statements, and a discussion forum that will let developers submit ideas, suggestions, and questions. OpsCode also released Chef 0.7.4 at Velocity.

Sponsors for O'Reilly Velocity 2009 were Keynote Systems, Google, Shopzilla, Aptimize, Facebook, NeuStar, The Rackspace Cloud, Schooner Information Technology, SoftLayer, SpringSource, and Sun Microsystems.

For complete information on O'Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, including videos, speaker presentation files, and photos, visit:

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For a roundup of Velocity-related content, including books, research reports, blogs and media, go to http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/public/content/related

To read Tim O'Reilly's take on the future, go to the O'Reilly Radar at:

For information about exhibiting at or sponsoring Velocity, contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com

If you would like to discuss forming a media or promotional partnership with O'Reilly for an upcoming event, contact mediapartners@oreilly.com

For a conference overview, visit: http://conferences.oreilly.com

More O'Reilly Conferences:

• OSCON in San Jose, CA, July 20-24, 2009
• Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Washington, DC, Sept 8, co-produced with TechWeb
• Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, Sept. 9-10, co-produced with TechWeb
• Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA, October 20-22, 2009, co-produced with TechWeb
• Web 2.0 Expo New York in New York City, Nov. 16-19, 2009, co-produced with TechWeb
• O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City, Feb. 22-24, 2010
• MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA, April 12-15, 2010, co-presented with Sun Microsystems
• Web 2.0 Expo SF in San Francisco, CA, May 3-6, 2010, co-produced with TechWeb.

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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