performance

This is a quick and dirty rundown on how to install Varnish 2.1.x on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS). Get sources setup Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list: Import the key for the new repository: Installation Update sources list and install varnish: Files of importance: Double-check: Further reading I recommend a mix of the following websites/links: Varnish 2.1 documentation Wiki with lots of tutorials and examples Team Soundcloud’s varnishtop (code on Github) Fin That’s all!...

In this blog post I’ll compare different CDNs with each other, on the list are: Akamai (through MySpace) CacheFly CloudFront EdgeCast (twice, through Speedyrails) LimeLight Networks (through mydeo) … and Amazon S3 — the pseudo CDN Thanks to SpeedyRails, EasyBib (CacheFly, Cloudfront, S3) and mydeo for helping with these tests. What’s a CDN? A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a service usually offered by Tier1’s or at least companies that have a so-called global network footprint....

These are some random operational things I learned about CouchDB. While I realize that my primary use-case (a CouchDB install with currently 230+ million documents) may be oversized for many, these are still things important things to know and to consider. And I would have loved to know of some of these before we grew that large. I hope these findings are useful for others. Compaction CouchDB doesn’t take great care of diskspace — the assumption is that disk is cheap....

Caching is one of the things recommended whenever something is slow — “Your [database, website, server]? Well, duh! You need a cache!”. All things aside, it’s not always easy to cache stuff. I find myself often in situations where I can’t cache at all or where a caching solution is complex as hell to implement. All of the sudden you need to dissect your page and lazy load half of it with Ajax — bah....

So I posted something on Twitter today, which wasn’t exactly news to me. I was more or less pointing out the obvious. From a couple follow-up tweets, I guess, I need to explain more. The idea My thesis is that there’s a gain in page rendering time when I disable automatic view rendering and use explicit render calls ($this->render('foo');) inside my controllers. And to cut to the chase, there is. On our app, I measured a 12% improvement using Xdebug’s profiler — simple before-after-style....