Blogs

osDate and mysql Performance Optimization Tips

Well, one of my websites has been successful to the point where I have to start looking into performance issues.  It's based on osDate, so most of what I find may be helpful to others using that system.  Since osDate uses image processing, mysql and smarty templates, these are the main areas for optimization.

(The following graph from my Google webmaster tools console was added Nov 30, 2009, three weeks after I began working on the optimizations, so you can see that even as my database grows - as it does slowly over time with a larger userbase - my average page load time is vastly improved due to these performance tips)

osDate Permission Denied Behavior

OsDate has a simple system for allowing only registered, logged-in users view certain pages.  These pages (like userpicgallery.php for instance)  simply include the file "sessioninc.php" right after setting up the session.  Sessioninc.php checks to see whether the user is a registered, logged-in user, and if not, redirects the user to the login page.

Landing Page and Referral Tracking For PHP/mysql osDate Site

I know from google analytics that about 25% of my paid clicks are from return visitors.  Drilling deeper, I learned that one visitor from a certain city in California (I know the exact city) has been searching google for one of my most expensive keywords and clicking on my adwords ad, as his way to return to my site.  OK, once or twice, that's great.  But this man visited fifty times in one week. I guess he likes my filipina dating site, Christian Filipina.  Hey Google, please give me some control to limit the number of repeat visits!

Installing Flash Video Chat With Your Own Chat Server or p2p

I've recently been learning about video chat for one of my sites.  Although Adobe is in the process of making p2p video chat widely available, by making it (RTMFP/Stratus) part of the nearly-ubiquitous Flash 10 standard (see adobe developer portal), it appears there are no good solutions for peer-to-peer video chat yet, so I'm now in the process of setting up a chat server on my dedicated centos linux box, and associated chat software to run it.

Setting up DKIM, SPF, Domainkeys DNS, Regular DNS on CentOS 5.3 at Pacificrack.com

I'm working with one site that is struggling with mail being rejected outright by other mail servers and sent to the spam box.  Over the past month, I've fixed a few errors in the MIME formats, contacted rejecting domains (aol, live, yahoo, etc), all of which has increased slightly the success rate on mail delivery.  But not enough.  So the next step has been to setup the signature pages so that the site can sign mail and no spammers can take advantage of the good reputation the site builds.  This is no guarantee, of course, but it's the next logical thing to try.

Installing Bugzilla on centos - perl modules and other issues

Here are a few tips I can share from my recent experience installing bugzilla on centos. I won't say this is the best way or the only way, or that it will work with your centos (or god forbid non-centos), but it did work for me, and this roadmap might help you a little.

How to Preview Your Site ie6-8 In Vista Using Virtual PC and localhost

If you've done any slightly-complex theming, and actually have people viewing your site, you know that many people still use old versions of Microsoft's ie browser.  

As you can see, ie7, ie6, and firefox each have about 30% of the visits to one of my sites for May 2008.  Since I use firefox and chrome for my basic site building and testing, they always display properly.  But because two thirds of my users are using problematic browsers (ie6 and ie7) I need to do testing of my pages whenever I do any display changes.

Thumbs Up/Down on Name.com, Goddady, Pacificrack, Pair.com

My recommendations for the week: Name.com serves my domains well.  Pacificrack.com delivers on dedicated servers.

On the way out of my favorite list is pair.com (high prices, low disk space quotas, and no support for mod deflate in shared hosting) -- though pair.com is reliable at least.

CentOS at Pacificrack.com: Fix Yum Hang with rpm and db files

I killed one yum process as it was doing an install, and my punishment was quick and severe: yum from that point forward just hang on most commands, doing nothing.  After consulting a variety of internet sites and forums, etc, trying out their solutions, here's what I did that worked (thanks http://www.linux-archive.org/centos/33529-yum-hangs-when-reading-local-rpmdb.html):

cd /var/lib/rpm

rm *__*   [3 db files]

rpm --rebuilddb

Testing:

yum list available

Setting Up a Dedicated Server at PacificRack.com: Simple DNS and Apache Configuration

Yesterday I wrote an intial entry about setting up a dedicated server at Pacificrack.com.  Today we'll continue with further DNS and apache configuration.

DNS configuration

The simple answer with DNS configuration is to allow the registrar to provide it.  Whether that's godaddy, name.com, etc, the registrar has several options for how to host your names.  You'll have to learn a little about the configuration interface to your registrar - if you follow my example, you won't be changing the name of the DNS servers, but rather changing the IP address only, but keeping the DNS server hosted by your registrar.