20090319 still sub optimal

One thing that I really do think that was more efficient about my previous blog was that I had it write data to static files which were then served by the http daemon. This is infinitely more efficient than executing php/mysql and everything else that a dynamic page requires.

This is very easily forgotten until the server melts while being hit by many bots simultaneously.

So far in the quest to find zen I’ve tried the following without any great success:

requesting all site pages and storing them on disk

To be fair, this does work, but its just time consuming. Annoyingly WordPress numbers pages from the newest (0) to the oldest (n). Which means that all pages have to be requested again once a new entry is placed on the stack.

varnish

Now, this truely was hopeful. But sadly it’s not worked out because of over caching things like captcha images. (This could be excluded but it’s just the tip of the iceberg

mod-cache

The same goes for mod-cache as varnish really, its going to cache too much and requires much tuning.

Finally some thoughts that might prove to be promising.

mod-renumber (or something)

Turn the page numbers around so that pre-generation is possible to reflect the post numbering in sequential order and thus a generation doesn’t necessarily require the full content to be produced. This is just a thought of mine, but I’d have to look into it a little more to work out what constitutes a page in WordPress terms, talk the DB and do the math. This has a lot more work involved in it than I’d like to dedicate time to.

simple wp-cache

Well, this is far from perfect as both php and possibly mysql have to churn away before the file can be cached to disk. Even then it might have to be served with on the fly compression. This can be turned off in Apache, but would it cause the server to breach bandwidth limitations

It would be very good if the authors put this sort of thing in mind when creating the blog. It would be great if there was a 'produce html' option.

Sadly Web 2.0 has some flaws, we don’t all operate from 64core servers.