Jeremy Chase

After a lot of hemming and hawing about everything from the domain name, to the content, to the design, here it is: TechOutburst

Basically it is a blog about things in my life that are tech related, and didn’t really fit into this blog. Mostly I didn’t want my random dog pictures intermingled with things about websites. So for those of you interested in that kind of stuff head over. Otherwise, stick around here for dog pics.

Jeremy

I decided to integrate tumblr into my blog because it is just really cool. Essentially it is another blog, but it also aggregates all my other online activities. So if I put a video on Vimeo it’ll show up on the Tumblr feed. If I Tweet, it’ll end up there. If I update this blog, it’ll go onto my tumblr page. Get the idea yet?

I hope you enjoy it. Link to Jeremy Chase’s Tumblr page!

The last few days I spent my blogging time playing with Drupal and xcache. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) which is similar to the backend of any newspaper style website. I had been fooling around with e107 for awhile, but Drupal is just more proven for scalability reasons. It has taken a few hours of stumbling around to get the hang of it, but my test site does ’stuff’ now.

I also was playing with the general performance of my blog using xcache along with lighttpd. It took quite a while to get xcache to work properly because I had a misconfiguration (I had slow-cgi enabled in addition to fast-cgi). After resolving that, having opcode cache really sped things up. Without using WP-Cache or xcache the site served about 3.5 pages/second. With xcache (and no WP-Cache) it was up to 11 pages/second.

That is well and good, but xcache + WP-Cache brings it up to unholy amounts. It turns out my previous testing was flawed because Slicehost limits bandwidth to 10mbit from the node. I was saturating that and the network was capping my result. If the network wasn’t an issue this hardware/software setup would be able serve this little blog at roughly 6,000KB/s (according to apachebench running on localhost). If a page averages 100KB, that is 60 pages/second. Given the 10mbit cap it can only serve about 10 pages/second.

Wordpress is notorious for being slow, and anyone thinking about higher loads on their blog is familiar with the idea of being ‘wordpressed’. Being wordpressed means that your blog has said it can’t go on anymore, and that you should go on without it.

With this in mind I started to look at just how fast my blog is. I have good hosting, but since Wordpress is dynamic it still takes a considerable resources to generate each page. Being a super dork I started looking at the performance issue by first looking at the database. I tweaked some MySQL cache variables and basically came up with no benefit. The site was still only able to load 3 pages per second, or 180 pages per minute.

I started to look at the WP Super Cache plugin, but apparently you need to be running Apache for some annoying reason. My blog is powered by lighttpd, and the idea of going back to Apache made me sad. There is another WP Cache plugin, suspiciously named WP Cache. Even though it wasn’t super I figured I would try it. Amazingly enough this plugin worked swimmingly, and was very easy to install. My blog can now serve about 8 pages per second, or 480 pages per minute.

480 pages per minute is nothing to sneeze at, so I don’t think I’ll bother optimizing this blog any more. (this is the whole page including images if you are curious) After doing this much testing I am a bit curious about how apache would hold up.

I was a little tired with how boring the site was looking so I decided to spend some time working on the CSS. I think it is obvious I tried to keep things simple, and am very curious to hear what you guys think.

If the site is funny looking you probably want to hit the refresh button!

Jeremy