Ars Wordpressae
Posted by Jacques Chester on Friday, June 29, 2007
Having begun an epic move from Darwin to Perth some weeks ago, I am at last established here, for the next 6 months at least. At the moment I am crawling along on dialup while Telstra — for the fifth consecutive time — play funny buggers with provisioning an ADSL connection at my local exchange.
What I would like to talk about briefly is what I will be doing with Club Troppo in the coming few weeks. Ken and I have been less than impressed with our move to a Virtual Private Server. It has, in actual fact, probably been slower than the already ordinary performance we got from Dreamhost, though somewhat more reliable. It turns out that while our hosting provider boasted good prices, excellent uptimes, generous memory, disk and bandwidth allowances, they very savagely cap CPU usage. Club Troppo is running on the equivalent of 250MHz of processing power. There isn’t enough grunt to complete MySQL queries before another one comes along, which produces an exciting pile-up of queries and page generation jobs strangling the available CPU time.
As some of you know, before leaving Darwin I spent about a week doing nothing but optimise the site. We’re running on lighter software, with aggressive tuning on MySQL, with fewer plugins, with 3 different layers of caching. Even so, the site chokes up with regularity: if you’re unlucky to ask something from outside the caches, you’ll essentially throttle the entire website. So, as I said, less than impressive.
Some reflection on the data I gathered while investigating optimisation options suggests that our delays are entirely server-bound. Bandwidth is not our problem. Ours is plenty fast and plenty generous. The home page, which is usually our heaviest page, still comes in under 100kb fully loaded in most cases.
This suggested to me a new approach to which Ken has agreed in-principle: to move Troppo again. This time we will trade off bandwidth for performance. I have ordered business-grade ADSL service with static IP and improved service level guarantees, and I will host Club Troppo on a server in my possession. This will give us about twice as much RAM and approximately 10-15x more CPU performance, which should more than meet our demands. Having a physical dedicated server also allows me to perform some more esoteric optimisations which are not available for a VPS, such as moving MySQL’s temporary table directory into a RAMdisk, or recompiling the entire software stack with the ICC compiler, or a number of other options.
There is some urgency in this move. My nightmare is the oncoming Federal Election. Club Troppo’s traffic surged dramatically in the 2003 election. I expect that 2007 will be no different, and I would like the site to be settled into a new server with surplus capacity well before John Howard drives up to the Governor-General’s digs for a friendly chat about election writs.
It also happens that Club Troppo is growing again. Traffic has been growing steadily month on month every month, even through the ongoing technical travails we’ve experienced. It has been (yet another) humbling experience for yours truly. I took up the role as site administrator confident that I could lick it without breaking a sweat. Instead I have learned far more about the Wordpress-to-Linux stack than I care to mention, and under quite stressful and trying conditions. I have been several times tempted to modify the “Managed by Jacques Chester” footer to read “Mismanaged by Jacques Chester”.
In any case, I thank Ken and Nick for putting up with my advice, which has typically been wrong; and for putting up with my services, which have been less than perfect. I’d also like to thank all of you, the readership and authorship of Club Troppo. This is a great site and it just keeps getting better in spite of me. So stick around — you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 5:26 PM and filed under Site News.
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Well, good on you Jacques! Having a dedicated Club Troppo Server can only be a good thing and I, for one, would be happy to kick in some dollars if it helps the cause.
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 5:47 pm | PermalinkGawd it sounds a nightmare!. Yer a bloody marvel.
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 6:13 pm | PermalinkYes. don’t be apologetic Jacques. Everyone (especially Nicholas and myself) is very grateful for your fantastic efforts under trying circumstances. It seems that neither shared hosting nor VPS is up to the mark when you run a blog with substantial readership and a large-ish database. At the risk of excessive pedantry, however, I should point out that the footer actually says “managed by by Jacques Chester” at present. I certainly hope it isn’t a Freudian slip. Any idea when the ADSL connection is likely to be operative?
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 8:06 pm | PermalinkThanks for the pedantry, Ken*. It’s the sort of thing I should spot myself.
As for ADSL, according to my new provider Telstra were meant to switch it on 2 days ago. Instead I need to wait for them to go to my local exchange again: 5 – 10 days. Goody.
* And thanks Geoff and Rex for your kind remarks. If it ever seems necessary to get a new server perhaps I will do a donations drive. I’ve seen it done in the past and on a site like this significant funds can be raised.
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 9:52 pm | PermalinkAgree with Ken – stop apologising, Jacques. At least once a week Blairs, Catallaxy or LP goes funny/slow/whatever. The latter two have stopped disappearing of late (although there was a scary half hour on the Cat last week), and I should probably touch wood while saying that. Everyone’s still figuring stuff out, not just you :)
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 11:41 pm | PermalinkMaybe I should apologise a bit less and work on rearranging how I administer the site. I’ve just recognised some of myself in this article: http://eddiesguy.blogspot.com/2007/06/creating-my-own-personal-hell.html
I think part of my trouble has been that I’ve fallen into many classic traps: the heroic hacker mindset, for example. Not really thinking about risks. Not debugging systematically through the proven hypothesise/develop test cases/test and conclude triad. What I’d really like to do at some point is work on my tools and processes for managing the site. I should be using revision control, bug tracking, unit testing and regression, systematic monitoring, release planning, risk management and all the other niceties we sacrifice. For software developers these practices are a lot like brushing teeth: boring habits which pay incredibly handsome pain-avoidance dividends.
So once I’ve dispatched the site move, and then the other outstanding issues surrounding it (such as re-establishing our email framework), and then finishing contracts, and depending on how much time I have as (fingers crossed) a student, I’d like to step back and reflect on how I manage the site and how I could do it better. And then do it.
Posted on 30-Jun-07 at 12:49 am | PermalinkOh, man, you like punishment, don’t you? Sounds like sysadminning in the Houdini fashion, locked in a straitjacket, held by the ankles in a pool of water.
Posted on 30-Jun-07 at 11:15 am | PermalinkRespect.
How Jacques will read his email in future; kill -9
btw I moved SSR off the mini-itx box on my wDSL connection about a month ago.
Posted on 30-Jun-07 at 2:37 pm | PermalinkI also see you’re running that new software of yours. I might do a test installation at some stage.
Posted on 30-Jun-07 at 2:43 pm | PermalinkOh, and I prefer rm -f /var/mail/jc myself.
Posted on 30-Jun-07 at 2:45 pm | Permalinkgive yourself more credit Jacques. No one does it quite like like like like you you you you :-) We’re all grateful.
Posted on 30-Jun-07 at 3:36 pm | Permalink