No matter the site, the traffic, the scope or content, a tip of the hat should always be gestured to the scale it needs to support. Not to say any effort should be put forth to make it the most scalable site or webapp in the universe, but certainly a little thought is allowed. Of course, I’ve said plenty of times before and will continue to: don’t fall into the trap of premature optimization. It’s dumb. And in most cases, developing to solve existing scalability issues is a business case most people are willing to take as it will (generally) save time, money, sanity and morale in the long run. Regardless, I also believe there are simple simple steps everyone setting up a site can take. Not as a premature optimization, but as a logical, default method of installing your web tier to ensure it’s optimized out of the box. Particularly when it’s combining different pieces of proven technology and enabling their features to prevent needless overhead, it’s no longer premature, it’s simply expected.
Posts Tagged: howto
19
Aug 09
Avoiding Latency when Using 3rd Party Widgets and Plugins
Anyone maintaining a site, blog or similar at some point has been tempted to add a widget or plugin provided by a 3rd party source. Twitter, Digg and ShareThis are just a few examples of sites that provide code and/or plugins (widgets) to help provide some level of dynamic and valued content. Although each of these can be incredibly useful (at least I think so as I’ve installed the Twitter WordPress plugin on this blog), they implicitly add page-rendering dependencies to your site as anyone who visits waits around for their code to load. Generally, this isn’t all that big of a deal as most of these sites have incredible uptime. But then there are sites like Twitter who seem to have some serious issues of staying alive. Particularly with plugins for content management applications like WordPress and the like, you have very little control into where the source will be loaded in the document and without any intervention, a staggering Twitter will throw your site into a tail-spin of foot tapping until your visitor’s browser finally gets fed up (after 30 seconds or so) and gives up the download. In the meanwhile, expect that person to not only leave your site but likely never come back. Not exactly what you’re looking for. Personally, I got fed up with Twitter’s lack of reliability, killing my load times and losing visitors. Luckily, if you are using a modern web server and you have access to modify the configuration, there is a simple patch you can apply to pull the reins back in and gain control of your own site performance. The example below is a patch you can apply to the Apache HTTP web server config although can be cross-ported to any of the other modern web servers that support Proxying.
16
Jul 09
Generating Heat Maps Using Perl
A while back, I worked on a project with a company I’m working for and it eventually evolved into something I released to Perl’s open archive network, CPAN and chatted about for my first SPUG talk. Naturally, as the Conwaytistical Perl programmer I am, I figured why not write about it one more time for old times sakes. Generally speaking, Google has already found the documentation for the module which is all I really figure is necessary to explain it. The crazy thing is that people seem to be using this… a lot. Likely for the same reason I made it: there are no programmatic alternatives that I could find. With this unfortune comes the destruction of my inbox with questions and curiosities ranging from examples to the process I took for making this module in the first place. All things considered, I’m happy to see people using the module but it turns out I’m a little lazy and don’t like responding to strangers’ questions all that much. Born from that comes this page. When the forces of this are combined with the perldoc, I’m no longer needed and can feel much more at ease with the temperature of my shoulder as I ignore the trickle of emails that come to me. Lucky for you, I am a personal fan of direct examples that can be followed without the needless bloat of words, and this is what I’m going to (try to) do. The only predicate to this instruction set is that we will assume you are going to map the US. It’s possible to map the entire world, but we will only work with the US for now. Go USA!