Updates

Written By: - Date published: 10:18 pm, December 30th, 2009 - 7 comments
Categories: admin - Tags:

sysop

Haven’t had as much time as I’d like for updates so far – there are some who have been insisting that I be social over the break! There is also a vast oversupply of wine in cupboard, beer in the fridge, and diet forthcoming in the new year where beer is forbidden (red wine is permissible, so I’ll have to console myself with that).

However there have been a number of efficiency updates put into place.

  • The DNS entries have been shifted to a wider range (2 to 5). This caused some outages as various ISPs didn’t update fast enough. I think that I responded to everyone who e-mailed, and since the e-mails have stopped, I guess everyone is now seeing the site.
  • The search engine is now running on sphinx search. This should give a better search engine and more importantly vastly reduce the loading that the previous search engine was causing on the SQL engine. It takes a lot of grunt to index into the number of posts and comments on the site. I’m still tinkering with the parameters, but try it out and let me know what you think. [update: updates search index every 5 minutes at present. ]
  • The restriction of comment entry on to older posts has been shifted to a new system. The calculation of when a post should have its comments turned off was causing some serious SQL usage. This was mainly an issue because the  search spiders like google and its relatives were spending a lot of time looking at old posts.

This should make the site faster and require a lot less CPU to run. That is good because it therefore doesn’t need a capacity upgrade. There are a lot of other things that I’ll be tinkering with over the break.

Right now I’ve been testing MiniDLNA to allow me to push the music collection from my Ubuntu server to the Sony Bravia upstairs and then into the old valve amp. Great sound. Now for the videos…..

Talking about wine has made me thirsty, and wanting to watch UB40.

A heartfelt thanks to the people who have been popping money into the Donate button on the left. It has been considerably reducing my cost to run the site. I’ll raise a glass to you.

7 comments on “Updates ”

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  1. illuminatedtiger 1
    30 December 2009 at 11:11 pm

    Doing any load balancing on your SQL servers?

    • lprent 1.1
      30 December 2009 at 11:21 pm

      Nope. The site runs on a single MySQL which uses replication to keep a hot site ready to start. That causes bugger all overhead as the transmitted data is low.

      Normally the major activity is just people or spiders doing a search. But I’ve noticed a steady rise in minutes over the last few months. Looks like an index was removed during wordpress updates causing the single post pages to do way too much work looking if the post should be closed or not. WordPress has added a similar feature to its core, so I switched to that.

  2. felix 2
    31 December 2009 at 9:56 am

    RED RED WINE (ORIGINAL) it says on the video title.

    God I hate being a pedant but I don’t think it’s too picky to point out that the original is Neil Diamond’s 1968 recording. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysxw7EON5xc

    (Just in case there’s any young’uns getting confused)

    Oh and as a bonus here’s Tony Tribe’s 1969 cover version in an upbeat ska styley. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEAPbjcvsww

  3. lprent 3
    4 January 2010 at 12:47 am

    damn the search has failed…. Now where is the bug.

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