Looking At Performance

Optimization and performance tuning is something that has sparked my attention and consumed lots of my spare time in the past couple of months.    All and all, it really has been worth it.

Late last year, it became clear to me that administration and upgrading was really becoming a real pain for me.   Just my family has over 20 blogs I administer and all ran their own installs of WP.   This required a couple of cheap hosting solutions and loads of time to keep each of these installs up to date with upgrades to the core and plugins.    It was just too time consuming.

In early Janauary, I released an install of WPMU to help ease this pain.    This allowed all blogs to be in the same installation with upgrading and plugins now much easier for me.    The problem with WPMU is that it is resource intensive.   It wasn’t something for the cheaper hosts and required a drastic change.

While my hosting solution now has enough resources and power to far exceed my requirements, it has led me to try and make both the server and my software as optimized as possible.   Here are some of things that I have found helped me out thus far:

1. The first solution I came across was the addition of wp-super-cache to help ease the load on the database server.   This plugin makes use of caching to server static HTML files of my most popular sites.   It has already decreased the server load substantially.
2. Optimization of Apache and mySQL were next on the agenda.    Media Temple has several resources that helped me with this and it was also coupled with some articles I found on the internet for securing and optimizing servers.    Simple things that help with servers.
3. Optimized and removed some the inefficient plugins that I was running.   Believe it or not, there are many plugins that are not efficient at all and can run “way too many” queries on the database.    Simple as turning on the wordpress benchmark that is commented out in most themes
4. One of the smartest things that I did as well is join WPMUDEV Premium.   Andrew and James are very wise and have several plugins for their members that make life easier.   The other members have also helped me out huge including input from Luke and Andrea R.   I appreciate it
5. After several discussions about database structure when it comes to WPMU, I have concluded having only one database will hinder my server resources and eventually will limit my expansion.     Since I have my own server, I implemented a multiple database solution that chooses the database from the hash of the blog.   It is pretty slick.   I started with 16 databases and decided it wasn’t going to be too hard to go with 256.   That is where I am now.   In theory, it is better to query a small database versus one large one.   Database caching is getting better, but really it won’t hurt me to go this way.
6. Trying to stop spammers is an easy way to slow down resource stealing.   I have quite a few plugins now to try and stop spammers before they use resources.    I also have many rules in my .htaccess file.   It seems to be helping.

There are some other things that I have done I am sure, but these are the ones that stick out in my mind while writing this.   It is a constant learning curve and I am open to ideas from others as well

Firefox CSS Question!

I really would like some advice on this problem that I am having with some avatar alignment in my comments. It seems that Firefox just can’t seem to figure out that the avatars are supposed to be on the same line with one of the left and one on the right. I know that having 2 avatars on comments is an entirely another issue, but my CSS program tells me that it and Safari display fine. Example working below:

Notice that in the following Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 example, it is now showing up aligned correctly with the right hand gravatar:

The code that is displayed from the source code is not working to display, so check out the “source” of:

http://trent.onvertigo.com/2008/03/06/comments-whoops/

What’s New On Sunday

Let me tell you briefly what I know since I have been up since 5:00 am MST.    I found out the following:

1. Obama pulled ahead 1,617 to 1,498 over Clinton yesterday with a few more pledged delegates
2. Raincoaster got the big laugh for me with her tumblr blog entry:
   • Why are the links I put in days ago not showing up on Technorati?????? I claimed this fucking braindead excuse for a blog already! - Source
3. If TechCrunch is even close to right we will be seeing Flickr Video here right away.  Then the decision to keep YouTube or head over to Flickr begins
4. I have tried out FriendFeed now and it is pretty neat.    It combines all things from all friends.   It is just another step in aggregation of things.  Hat Tip to Chris for the link to check it out!
5. It is called that the US should drop their fed rate another  75 bps next week even though Bush thinks that is would be a problem
6. Hoping I would be, but no further ahead on my domain problems
7. Really starting to enjoy twitter more.    That is pretty fun!

Just some interesting things I have been wasting the past couple of hours with.

What’s New On Sunday

Let me tell you briefly what I know since I have been up since 5:00 am MST. I found out the following:

1. Obama pulled ahead 1,617 to 1,498 over Clinton yesterday with a few more pledged delegates
2. Raincoaster got the big laugh for me with her tumblr blog entry:
   • Why are the links I put in days ago not showing up on Technorati?????? I claimed this fucking braindead excuse for a blog already! - Source
3. If TechCrunch is even close to right we will be seeing Flickr Video here right away. Then the decision to keep YouTube or head over to Flickr begins
4. I have tried out FriendFeed now and it is pretty neat. It combines all things from all friends. It is just another step in aggregation of things. Hat Tip to Chris for the link to check it out!
5. It is called that the US should drop their fed rate another 75 bps next week even though Bush thinks that is would be a problem
6. Hoping I would be, but no further ahead on my domain problems
7. Really starting to enjoy twitter more. That is pretty fun!

Just some interesting things I have been wasting the past couple of hours with.

Domain Mapping Questions

I have really been working on getting the annoying issues of my WPMU install sorted out today.   With the addition of my ssl certificate on the server, anything that works on a domain outside of *.onvertigo.com is just a pain in the ass.    If anyone posted a comment on any of my mapped domains, they would receive a request to accept an ssl certificate that didn’t match what GoDaddy authenticated.    This also was the problem for anyone trying to administer the mapped domain.     Since it is cost prohibitive having more than one ssl certificate, this wasn’t going to be a long term solution since I have several mapped domains now and will have plenty more in the future.

That leaves me wondering how I can replicate what is done on wordpress.com in terms of domain mapping.    They use the subdomains of wordpress.com as the administration area and cookies, yet still manage to server up the mapped domain as if it really was the URL!    I have now worked on “part” of this solution by using reverse-proxy to serve up my domain names on top of the actual subdomain installs now, but all the links on the page are part of the subdomain and not the domain name.   Once again, I hope not a long term solution.
Anyone who goes through my blog now will be able to see what I mean since even though this domain is still trentadams.com and trentadams.ca, the main URL being served is http://trent.onvertigo.com and that is the way it has to be for what I am ultimately trying to accomplish.    The reverse-proxy is able to serve up all older links as if they are really there (saving search and archive traffic), but it doesn’t help for my new traffic other than that which is created off my RSS feeds or people typing in my domain names.

I really am wondering if anyone has any ideas on how I can continue to use my trent.onvertigo.com URL for the backend and still serve up my trentadams.com front end in a more consistent manner!     I am sure the good folks at wordpress.com would have the answer, but I am not sure they will let out all of their trade secrets!    For those that really don’t want to post online, but might want to throw me a “bone“, please contact me on this contact page!   Any help would be greatly appreciated

Start of Grass Season 2008

Today the grass season started for us on our main ranch with the arrival of some of our cattle. I guess I should almost called it the start of the Pied Piper as that is what these first two (2) photos look like! May the year be full of rain and prosperity!

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