This website’s speed and reliability have not been great in recent months, but they really went to hell over the past week.
As a result, I’ve spent the past couple of days learning far more than I ever wanted to know about optimizing the PHP/Apache/MySQL stack and tweaking the server configuration accordingly.
I also substantially increased the capacity of the server. This of course substantially increased cost. Whereas I used to easily serve this site off a standard $5/month shared hosting setup, I am now up to $75/month and counting. The housing bubble has certainly gone mainstream.
Anyway, I wanted to bring everyone into the loop on why the server has been acting squirrely of late, why my tweaking caused it to be extra-squirrely yesterday, and why I hope that performance should substantially improve going forward.
Now, if all goes well, I may actually start generating some content. Thanks for bearing with me…
We still have a couple more
We still have a couple more tricks up our sleeve so there should be more performance improvement in the days ahead. But between now and then the site might act intermittently weird as we try new things.
Thanks Rich, for all your
Thanks Rich, for all your hard work on this site. I’m sure you’re not happy with performance problems and I’m even more sure that the $75/month is the cheap part of it compared to your time and energy.
(and, of course, it’s easy for me to say $75 is “cheap” since I’m not the one paying it!)
Just an update… we turned
Just an update… we turned off the search feature because we think it may be causing some of the problems. We also made some config changes that necessitated a restart… sorry for the brief downtime.
Rich, I sure appreciate your
Rich, I sure appreciate your hard work to provide such a valuable service to our community. Besides those of us who post regularly, there are many “lurkers”, and we are all benefitting from your generosity. I sure wouldn’t mind making a donation, if there were a way to do so…
That’s very kind to offer.
That’s very kind to offer. Don’t worry about it though — the site pays for itself via advertising. The hosting costs were just mentioned as a point of interest regarding how much readership and site content has grown.
Speaking of which, there may continue to be spotty behavior over the next week or so as we try out various performance optimizations… apologies in advance.
thanks…