... TagViewer (entries by tag)
... TagViewer (entries by tag)
LGF Janitorial Engineer Stinky Beaumont wishes to apologize for the occasional slowdowns and connection errors you may have experienced this evening. Stinky would like you to know that this time it wasn’t a traffic spike, but some deliberate benchmarking and testing that has to happen on a live system—or works ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring, Table Locking, Contention, Benchmarking
Why didn’t anybody tell me about these table locking issues (nooooo!) in MySQL? This is actually good news, because the overwhelmingly geeky page linked above helped me to solve an extremely annoying problem that has been causing sporadic, mysterious lockups at LGF since the database makeover. Who knew that there ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring, Table Locking, Contention
As I peruse our search logs, I keep finding various web robots abusing the search feature in various ways, draining bandwidth and tying up resources on both the web server and the DB server. So tonight there’s gonna be some changes made. You may have already noticed the new ultra-spiffy ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Bandwidth, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring, Registration
The reaction to my idea for a feature that would show the currently logged in users was decidedly mixed, with many good arguments on both sides, so I’ve decided to hold off on this for now until all the ramifications can be properly assessed. Here’s another question for the Lizard ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring, Pagination
I’m continuing the overall security review and code refactoring of LGF, and there are some small but perhaps noticeable changes in our “Manage Your Account” page as a result. The first time you enter that page, you’ll be greeted with a login form. Once you sign in to the Account ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring, User Management
Yes, we have yet another change to announce. In our quest to conserve bandwidth and system resources, and keep LGF online as much as possible, we’ve now set up an account with Feedburner and changed the addresses of our two RSS feeds. There’s a redirect that will automatically forward you ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring, RSS, Feedburner
All I can say is, those poor, poor hamsters in server 1 are having a really rough time of it today. We not only have traffic still coming from fark.com, every lefty blog on the web decided to attack as well. I should have known better than to poke Murphy ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
I’d guess that 90%+ of LGF’s readers aren’t aware that something huge happened here over the weekend. And that’s exactly the result for which I was hoping. The entire back-end LGF Blog Engine was swapped out, while the site was live. The whole thing. It’s a little like rebuilding a ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
OK, I’m almost ready to declare the database redesign an unqualified success. Server loads are way down, and all the modules are operating well. I’ve been monitoring the MySQL activity with the mysqladmin tool, and all systems look good. (As I mentioned before, the real test comes tomorrow, with our ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
I sense a huge turmoil in the Lizardsphere; a feeling that thousands of beings are waiting impatiently for LGF comments to be re-enabled. I’m glad to announce that the wait is now over. Let the verbiage flow. UPDATE at 4/1/07 11:34:17 am: I’m really pleased by the performance improvement so ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
Comments are currently disabled while MySQL performs a very time-consuming operation (adding a FULLTEXT index on the comment author name field). It’s been cranking away for about 6 hours now; it needs to work through 3.6 million comments, so it may be a little longer. Comments will be turned back ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
Why wait any longer? The MySQL conversion is complete, and all the Blog Engine modules have passed every test I could dream up. Special attention was paid to preventing a common database exploit called an “SQL injection” attack, by using the most modern and up-to-date PHP database abstraction layer available. ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
The server load got crazy there for a while, and we had to reboot it more than once. Here’s an open thread while I feed the hamsters. And while I’m at it, here’s a sneak preview of the new MySQL-based LGF search tool. (Link now removed because it’s currently under ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
Anyone need any spare traffic? I seem to have too much these days. But while we were offline, I completed more testing on the MySQL conversion; so if everything goes according to my best-laid plans, things will improve very soon. The target date for the launch of the new system ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
Some more books on my desk: Most of the Blog Engine is now refactored to use MySQL. (Not on the live server; on the development server.) I saved what I thought would be the hardest part for last: the LGF search feature. But MySQL’s built-in search capabilities are not ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
Somehow an LGF post made it past the Brain Police and onto the front page of Digg.com, so we’re currently going up and down depending on the waves of traffic; we’re still mostly online because it’s after work hours now in the US. Some of you West Coast Lizards are ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL, Refactoring
Excellent progress was made on the LGF Blog Engine MySQL Makeover today. Here’s the current status of the project: * Registration system and Lizard Overlord Tool - DONE * Logging functions - DONE * Display modules - front page, entries with/without comments, monthly archives - DONE * Monthly archive index ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine, MySQL
In the ongoing LGF Blog Engine Makeover Project, huge progress was made today on the display side of the application. I’ve settled on the database table designs for entries and comments, converted most of the existing entries/comments to MySQL, and now the display engine is capable of building and sending ...
LGF, Technical Info, Database, MySQL, Abstraction Layer, PHP, Refactoring, Design Patterns, MVC, Blog Engine
Some (not all) of my bathroom reading material for the LGF Makeover Project: And an update on our caching experiments: I’ve abandoned them. Not because caching isn’t good. But because I worked out an even less processor-intensive way to achieve the same effect—by writing out separate “no comments” versions ...
LGF, Technical Info, Blogosphere, Traffic, Makeover, Blog Engine