A quick point about timing
I've just deployed my V3 blog engine to live. In doing so, the time per query jumped from <10 mSec per query to ~2.5s — which meant that the typical page…
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…
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…
Performance in a Webfusion shared service and guidelines for optimising PHP applications
I manage a few websites on a hobby / pro-bono basic, with this personal site being the smallest and the OpenOffice.org user forums being the largest (nicknamed usOOo after initials…
A PHP Cache Overview and Cache Tuning
This note is a mix of material. The new content is really for the phpBB developers and assumes a detailed understanding of the phpBB architecture. It's aim is to raise…
Use cases for phpBB
Any performance tuning analysis is best grounded in a hard target system to provide the instrumentation data. In the case of a product such as phpBB, the best we can…
VBA vs OOo Basic Performance II
This article follows on from VBA vs OOo Basic Performance where I discussed OOo Basic performance and coding efficiency, and one of the specific issues was “how long does it…
VBA vs OOo Basic Performance
I am currently working on a HOWTO on VBA to OOB migration. As part of this I have been doing a benchmark comparison on their relative performance. The preliminary results…
Performance Collapse in Systems
Introduction This paper describes a macroscopic characteristic of complex systems that can result in performance collapse in seemingly random and undiagnosable ways. In recent months I have had to troubleshoot…