More fun with the Webfusion configuration
This is a follow-up to my article on building a Webfusion test VM. My aim is to create a test environment which reflects my Webfusion environment at a file system…
Creating a test VM to mirror the Webfusion Shared Service
In previous articles I have discussed how difficult it is for users of a shared web hosting service such as Webfusion's to develop and to debug applications on a service…
Oh, the embarrassment!
I’ve just discovered a bug in my blog: any comment posts get thrown into the bit-bucket and are never passed to me for acceptance / publishing if the user making…
More on using Rewrite rules in .htaccess files
This article is a further discussion how to use rewrite rules on a shared hosting service (SHS) such as the one supplied by Webfusion and that I use. It develops…
HTTP Caching Revisited
I find the issues around of Web performance very interesting. I’ve researched pretty comprehensively and written a few articles in this area. I also routinely use various web tools to…
A good web application spoilt by poor Internet performance
My wife and I have a cottage on the Greek island of Alonissos – at the very top of the village in the photo to the right. We like the…
The Anatomy and Timing of a Web Request – Part II
In Part I of this analysis, I looked at the overall timeline of viewing a webpage, and my main recommendations were: The correct webserver configuration is essential to ensure that…
The Anatomy and Timing of a Web Request – Part I
My academic background was mathematics, specialising in operations research and statistics. I put this to good use when I first started my career in an IT consultancy, in working one…
phpBB Performance – Reducing the script load overhead
This is the third in a series of phpBB performance articles and in this one I want to investigate how feasible it would be to use code globbing to reduce…
phpBB Performance – Reducing the data cache overhead
As I described in a previous article, you can use Linux utility strace to instrument a web request simulation and suPHP model. sudo -u www-data strace -tt -o /tmp/strace.log php…
phpBB Performance – A 3x challenge
The trigger for this article was a conversation with Mark Fisher, someone that I mentored through his early career, and who has remained a close friend over the years, though…
PHP – Why is image activation such an overhead?
As I’ve discussed in earlier articles, such as Using PHP applications on a Webfusion hosted service (Linux), a webserver will be able to achieve far higher thoughput processing PHP requests…
Getting burned on PHP operator precedence
With a POST form, you need to be careful when you return the response that the user might just issue a refresh and in doing so resubmit the form, resulting…
Putting it all together: my blog engine architecture
This blog has pretty much turned into a self-referential exercise as a major theme in my articles is the development and performance of the blog engine itself. This started because…
Rounding off the use of TinyMCE for WYSIWYG editing
This is a follow-up a previous article, which described how I use the TinyMCE editor for comment and article creation. However, at the time of writing this, there were four…
So why CSS Sprites?
Use of CSS sprites is an advanced HTML technique that can be a little controversial – at least in terms of questioning whether any potential performance benefits merits the effort…
A lightweight HTML cache for a Webfusion shared service
This article takes the optimisation of my blog engine to a next stage. It develops some of the thoughts and concepts that I’ve previously discussed in the following articles: Using…