Scaling Up: Making Your Website Stand Up To Traffic

The ability to turn a website into a large web service is a skill that’s deeply important amongst web application developers, but yet I’ve found it to be somewhat lacking. How is it that this fundamental skill is so often overlooked? Part of it has to do with the fact that many developers work on applications that have a fairly small user base: less than 5,000 users per day, for example. Other times it’s because PHP is so easy to learn that the developers who master it don’t learn the architecture that goes along with it.

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Converting To WordPress

Tonight I took the plunge. After nearly two years of writing and maintaining my own blogging software, I converted over to WordPress, the ubiquitous platform used by, well, pretty much everyone.

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Hitting the Database Less: Quick and Dirty Strategies for Database Efficiency

Below are a list of my top five quick-and-dirty strategies for improving database performance in web applications. These suggestions are culled from recent experience and mixed with some ideas that I’ve implemented in my own code. They’re not high level, but they are something we need consistent reminders about. Here they are…
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Benchmark Early and Often

This past week I had to deal with a new concept: a client site that failed due to excessive load. Most of the week was spent optimizing the site by doing the critical components: installing APC, ensuring that our caching (Akamai) was satisfactory and properly configured, and making performance improvements.

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