June 2008 Review
July 2, 2008
My father is always telling me that “simple” is the best way to do anything. Over complicating can be an OK thing if it pays or is worth it, but simple is always the way. That is pretty much how I can sum up June 2008 in saying that we tried to simplify things.
The first thing that we did was make yet another move to a dedicated server as after great lengthy reading and discussions, having one server that has more resources is a better way to go than having multiple points of failure for the site with multiple VPS servers. It is also easier to manage. That is why we picked a beefy box with multiple cores, processors and more RAM than is required. We still have a VPS for testing and redundancy with files and databases so that our original strategies still are present.
In terms of our service, we also have looked at a more simple approach and took away all the things that might be nice to have, but were just not popular. This is turn also increased the speed of everything and we are a lean and mean machine again. We also introduced the newer WPMU code that has Google Gears to speed up your administration area.
Traffic was great again this month and we introduced a solution to have advertising that is geared towards those that are not logged in and not shown to regular visitors of your site. It should be a nice solution moving forward that is a great compromise to revenue to keep the service free versus upsetting users and their regular readers.
We have also turned off “user” registration on the service until we can find a better way to slow down the spam and unwanted registrations. All blog creation is available to existing users so you can keep making new ones! All new “user” registration will be done by myself manually and you can send requests to me through my contact form.
The social networking features that we plan on releasing will only be released when the “completed” releases of BuddyPress become available as it is too difficult to keep testing features on our production site and I don’t have the time to test them on our VPS. We want this service simple and bug free. That is the best way to do anything.
All and all, July looks like another round of getting the service even better and more important, simple.
Expansion of Service
June 15, 2008
We have made a few changes to the service and will directly improve the performance of the service and the space required for the upcoming improvements in our social networking. With the insight from some great people we have now setup our backup service well beyond what we originally planned and improved the hardware to deliver a great service for our friends and family. We are happy to have you all blogging with us and thank you for your patience through our upgrades.
xCache and eAccelerator
May 22, 2008
We are doing some testing of running xCache and eAccelerator on the server to help boost the performance of all php applications on the server. The obvious choice of this optimization is WPMU since that is the only application run on this server 
First, we tested out eAccelerator and it was a good thing to have installed. It helped us with serving up pages faster and helped with our concurrent users. Used in conjunction with object cache and will wp-super-cache the server was immediately running faster. What was disappointing to me is that not only does eAccelerator use loads of disk space, it also was more of a memory pig than I imagined it would be. I jumped to using an additional 100 MB of RAM and after 24 hours did not drop even though it was configured for 32 MB.
Next we ran xCache on the server and it seemed to be as fast as eAccelerator and in the beginning was also using some additional RAM but it must have been for the first caching. It eventually released the memory and had a smaller disk write for caching. With the addition of object cache and wp-super-cache it seems faster using less resources.
That is the one that we are sticking with for now. I am not sure why eAccelerator wouldn’t release the extra memory, but I was testing out 3 common configurations for VPS servers and nothing helped. xCache did drop the memory after the caching and seems a better fit for us right now. More after further testing.
Trent Adams