Linux and PHP web application support and development (Bromsgrove, UK)
Here’s why it’s a good idea …. (The server was upgraded on the 23rd of May. The graph shows CPU time – where yellow is idle and blue+green are used/busy).
Some time ago, we upgraded a customer’s Debian Lenny Linux server from running a 2.6.26 based kernel to use a 3.2 kernel. It hosts a relatively popular website, and the performance optimisations in the 3.2 kernel (particularly around TCP slow start) have made a big difference to page load times (for more information see this […]
Web applications often have a requirement to log information about a request to a database. In a contrived example this could just be a global counter which attempts to amaze visitors to your site about how many requests you’ve handled in the last hour/day/week/month. One approach to doing this is to update a database each […]
At the moment we’re redeveloping an existing JSON based API, which is used by a mobile application. We knew the performance of the previous release of the API was good – it’s been in use for the last two years without any problems, and easily outperforms a competitor’s API. However, our dataset size is due […]
How to improve WordPress/Apache performance on a relatively heavily loaded server using Varnish and more
Background A WordPress site we maintain had one page (warning: some of the pages/images may offend) displaying a large number of posts (they all happen to be galleries) using the nextgen-gallery plugin. The Problem The page in question, on each load, would perform a query on posts within a specified category, and display them inline. […]
Introduction Not so long ago, a customer was using an bespoke online store for selling clothing. For 99% of the year, the site would perform perfectly (fast page loading times and so on) – however at the start of a sales promotion, the site would collapse due to a huge spike in requests from potential […]