performance
Everything Old is New Again
It's time for my quarterly blogging drive, and to start, here's some information on my ever-increasing need to try out cool web technologies.
Server Migration
My previous server was a VPS with 1 GB RAM for an obscenely low price from Serve By Design. I'm not linking to them, because I wouldn't recommend them, as you'll see. For the money, I didn't expect them to stay around forever, and I was right. At the end of September, I got an email saying that they had to immediately cease all hosting and that I had 10 days to move my VPS. Not great, but I can deal with that.
I've been doing some work with Rackspace's cloud products recently for work, so I decided to move to a Cloud Server VPS running CentOS. I'm quite impressed with the Rackspace Cloud thus far, they have a robust backup / cloning system, and the plans are plenty cheap so long as your data transfer isn't too high. Since I'm using SimpleCDN to handle all static content for my Drupal 6 sites, there's really nothing to worry about on the data transfer front.
Need for Speed
I've been doing some pretty exciting things recently with website performance. I always disliked doing IT work in the past, but the challenge of setting a server up to be able to withstand crushing traffic is now quite intriguing to me.
To wit, here's a funny moment from a recent experiment. I was using incrond to run a script to minify some JavaScript whenever Drupal created a new JS file. Unfortunately, my script also created a new JS file (a backup, unminified copy,) and the protection I put into place wasn't quite working correctly. I think the image below speaks for itself.
