"Check your Plone site's cachefu setup: small improvements
can help a lot. I assume you've got a basic cachefu setup pat down already,
which only means adding your few custom content types to the "content" or
"container" rules and saying you've got squid (and/or apache) in front. You
get good results with that: this blog entry helps you pinpoint some extra
improvements."

Complete Story

"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."

Complete Story

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.

Complete Story

For a large Drupal site, one of the biggest performance boosts one can do is to install an op-code cache/accelerator. PHP op-code caches / Accelerators Since PHP is an interpreted language, every page access has to load the script, parse it, compile it into op-codes, then execute it. This load/parse/compile cycle can add up to a lot of processing time, specially when you have lots of page accesses.  Op-code caches/accelerators eliminate this load/parse/compile time, by doing so once, and keeping the compiled version of the script in memory (or disk) and use it next time a page requests this script.

"With the release of Drupal 5, you might be wondering which version of Drupal is faster -- the latest release in the Drupal 4 series, or the new Drupal 5?"

"WP-Cache and spam. Who’d have thought they were related? Unfortunately they are because when your blog is spammed WP-Cache doesn’t check if the comment is legitimate or not and deletes cached files related to the spammed post."

Complete Story

Over the weekend, I upgraded the server that hosts CMS Report with the latest stable releases of MySQL and eAccelerator. The upgrade from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 was easy compared to the upgrade I made a year ago from MySQL 3.23 to 4.1. This time around I also have use of CPanel which meant I could make the database upgrade with at least one eye closed. My journey with upgrading from eAccelerator 0.9.4 to 0.9.5 however took a lot longer.

I've been using eAccelerator 0.9.4 since it was released early in 2006. I've gotten into some trouble in the past by those smarter than me when I tried to explain exactly what eAccelerator does and does not do. To play it safe this time around, I'll give you the summary of what eAccelerator does straight from eAccelerator.net:

Complete Story