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…