Tag Archives: Performance

Welcome to the new server

By Dougal | Published: December 4, 2009

After much flailing about and gnashing of teeth, you should now be seeing this site served up by my new webhost. My original plan to use FastCGI + PHP CGI didn’t pan out (for some reason). But with other improvements to my configuration, I think that the new setup should work pretty well.

After it’s had some time to burn in, and I have the chance to twiddle some more knobs, I’ll try to post a few tidbits of what we changed. [...]

Posted in Announcements | Also tagged Apache, configuration, fastcgi, Servers | Leave a comment

Server Reconfig Redux

By Dougal | Published: December 4, 2009

After a couple of failed attempts at switching to the new server setup, it seems I’m going to have to fall back and punt (at least on a portion of it). With the help of Frederick Townes, I have what should be a really screaming-fast web server setup. But for some reason, it seems that the Apache Worker MPM + FastCGI (mod_fcgid) + PHP CGI combination is not stable. At least, it’s not for me. [...]

Posted in Announcements | Also tagged Apache, fastcgi, mod_fcgid, mod_php, PHP, Servers | Leave a comment

Server Reconfig

By Dougal | Published: November 13, 2009

This blog will be moving to a new server very soon. If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice a thing. But just in case, I figured I’d give a warning, so that if you try to visit and you get an error, or the site won’t come up, you’ll know to just come back again later instead of thinking that my site was an early victim of the 2012 apocalypse or something.

I’m doing more than just moving onto a new server though. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged Apache, fastcgi, hosting, mod_expires, mod_fcgid, mod_php, PHP, prgmr, slicehost, tuning, virtual private server, vps, WordPress, xen | 19 Comments

W3 Total Cache Plugin

By Dougal | Published: August 26, 2009

There’s a new WordPress cache plugin in town, and it’s called W3 Total Cache. This plugin is one of the contestants in the 2009 Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition.

The W3 Total Cache plugin (W3TC for short) is an advanced cache plugin, and you can only have one of those on your site at once. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged apc, cache, caching, compression, CSS, html, JavaScript, memcache, memcached, minimize, PHP, php opcode cache, Plugins, WordPress, xcache | 58 Comments

Efficient permalink strategies for WordPress

By Dougal | Published: February 4, 2009

Over the past several days, there has been an interesting discussion on the wp-testers mailing list (though, it really belonged on the wp-hackers list, but that’s beside the point) about permalink structures in WordPress. The original question came from matthijs and questioned why WordPress was storing rewrite rules for every page on his site in a database option. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged cms, good urls, permalink patterns, permalinks, pretty permalinks, url structure tags, urls, WordPress, xcache | 111 Comments

Firefox 3

By Dougal | Published: January 4, 2008

Late last night, I installed Firefox 3 Beta 2. I’ve been running it all day, opening and closing tabs throughout, with a peak of around 45 tabs open, and an average somewhere around 25-30.

I don’t know what they’ve done to improve the memory handling (it’s currently using 394M virtual, 161M resident, 19M shared), but the responsiveness has been awesome. In Firefox 2, my machine would have been thrashing like a dying wildebeest, slogging down the performance of every other app on the machine. [...]

Posted in Applications, Browsers, Software, Tech | Also tagged app, Beta, Firefox, ui | 4 Comments

Site Problems

By Dougal | Published: January 23, 2007

Over the last few days, it’s possible that you might have tried to visit this site and gotten a blank page. It’s not you, it’s me. Or more precisely, it’s my server, and my attempts to eek a little more performance out of it.

The problem seems to come from APC (Alternative PHP Cache). I’m not absolutely sure why it decides to crap out on me like that, but I suspect that the real root of the problem might be some old supporting libraries on this server that need to be updated. [...]