Handy note to keep ready for the boss when he asks if we should upgrade to Vista or not.

InfoWorld:  Our tests show that Windows Vista and Office 2007 not only smash Redmond’s previous records for weight gain, but given the same hardware diet, run at less than half the speed of generation XP.

Now, to be honest I really do like Microsoft's Office 2007 and most of my people would give it a thumbs up.  It is Vista that I have a hard time accepting.  How do you justify Microsoft's Vista in the office...especially when everything just seems to run slower on Vista..

"In the good old days when building web sites was as easy as knocking up a few HTML pages, the delivery of a web page to a browser was a simple matter of having the web server fetch a file. A site's visitors would see its small, text-only pages almost immediately, unless they were using particularly slow modems. Once the page was downloaded, the browser would cache it somewhere on the local computer so that, should the page be requested again, after performing a quick check with the server to ensure the page hadn't been updated, the browser could display the locally cached version. Pages were served as quickly and efficiently as possible, and everyone was happy."

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"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television, I know because I designed it."

- Larry Roberts, ARPANet and Telnet founder, quoted in "Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies", Wall Street Journal, Oct 2, 2007

"We can no longer rely on last-generation technology, which has essentially remain unchanged for 40 years, to power Internet performance."

- Larry Roberts, ARPANet and Telnet founder, quoted in "Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies", Wall Street Journal, Oct 2, 2007

"If you want to improve server performance, the best way is to move as much of the processing off it and onto the client machine. All those visitors of yours are running souped up AMD and Intel CPUs with their big screens and fat harddrives. No wonder your small little hosting plan can’t keep up. Here are some very good ideas from a Slashdot comment I read this morning."

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"Now that OSC is up and running smoothly, it's necessary to look back on the deployment process and share the lessons that were learned. There was a point in the design phase where we were considering abandoning Drupal all-together due to dismal page loading times.

Part of fixing the performance problems of OSC was understanding the performance of Drupal in the first place. Both Harry and I had worked on Joomla and Wordpress sites, but neither of us had deployed Drupal sites before."

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I'm in the middle of upgrading my VPS server from PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.1.  So if you don't hear from me anytime soon...you now have an explanation.

Actually, I'm not too worried about breaking the server.  I am however worried about breaking a few of the applications that may not be compatible with PHP 5.2.  Also, about half the time I recompile Apache through Cpanel on the server I find I also need to spend some time  also restoring eAccelerator.  The worry has nothing to do with whether I'm up to the challenge but more of a time issue.  I don't know what it is, but everything in my IT world seems to be hitting at once.   Anyway, here goes...

Updated: 1:35 PM CDT:  So far I haven't seen any conflicts between PHP 5.2.1 and the applications I'm running on the server.  I did have to raise the memory_limit in my php.ini and  make a new install of eAccelerator.  It cost me a little bit of lunch time, but that is about it.

Updated: 316 PM CDT:  Wow, all my sites on this server seem to be zipping along.  Perhaps the observed performance boost is due only to a reboot of the server, but I'd like to think that it has something to do performance improvements in PHP 5.2.1.  One additional change I also did was remove the Microsoft Frontpage Server extensions.  I haven't used Frontpage in years.

2bits is spending a lot of time lately discussing how best to manage a high traffic Drupal site.  This particular article on Drupal's built-in caching caught my attention.

As a site grows, the overhead of executing so many queries per page against the database starts to add up. This is where caching can benefit a high traffic site. Drupal core caching Caching stores "elements" in a cache table in the database, so the data can be retrieved by a single query, rather that constructing the page from individual elements. Drupal's core cache has two parts, stuff that gets caches no matter what, and stuff that is optional via an administrator defined settings.

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