Move over design patterns, here come crash patterns! I’ll be talking about this concept in my “Server Down” CFUnited 2008 presentation in June. As many of you know, we here at Webapper have gotten loads of “server down” calls and emails over the years, so the purpose of my talk is to organize all of what we’ve seen into best practices for preventing performance and stability problems, and also for what to do when problems do arise. And one way we’ve started to organize this information is with the concept of “crash patterns”. It’s modeled after the familiar idea of design patterns, but applies instead to common/recurrent causes of performance and/or stability problems (the two usually go together). And, as with design patterns, once you come to understand crash patterns (both in general, and those that are specific to your applications), you can use them to make your life a whole lot easier. And when it comes to performance and stability, that means using the knowledge of crash patterns to avoid these problems in the first place, and it also means having optimal steps to take when/if problems do arise on your production systems.

I hope to see tens of thousands of you packed into the room in D.C! In the meantime, if you have any thoughts/comments/questions, please send them along, as I’d love to incorporate even more community/attendee input into my presentation.