Planning for the post that Matt links to

For most of the time that I’ve had my multisite network and the underlying infrastructure that I’ve written about lately, I’ve been overly focused on performance and scalability.

I say “overly focused” because I average about 50 views a day here on ethitter.com, on a good day. I write about exceedingly technical–or exceedingly uninteresting–topics, so that’s no surprise.

It’s also no surprise that my two most-popular posts are both about Automattic: the first announcing my hiring, the second declaring that Matt will have to fire me to be free of me. Interest in our hiring process and company culture far exceeds that which exists for my blathering.

When Matt retweeted the latter post back in January, my heart paused, then skipped into overdrive. Beyond the excitement of Matt recognizing my post, I immediately feared the embarrassment of my site crashing.

As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. The pageviews were, while meaningful for this humble site, insignificant as far as the infrastructure was concerned. No resource-usage alerts were triggered, nor did my provider inform me that I’d exceeded my plan’s allotments. Between Redis-based object and page caching, nginx microcaching, and a robust CDN, there was really no cause for concern.
Continue reading Planning for the post that Matt links to

Building My Network

Over the past three years, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit on a single project. It started off innocently. Since then it’s grown to occupy a significant place in my daily thoughts.

As you read this, you’re experiencing the product of these efforts. Perhaps you clicked on an eth.pw short URL to get here. If not, your browser still had to figure out how to get to ethitter.com. Now that you’re here, maybe you need to contact me via email. To make any of these endeavors possible, I’ve built a personal “network” of servers and had endless fun doing so.
Continue reading Building My Network

Redis Object Cache for WordPress, the Accidental Effect of PHP 5.5

Last week, I went a little upgrade-crazy with the VPS that hosts this site. With SPDY 3.1 support in nginx 1.5, I upgraded. I also bumped PHP from 5.4 to 5.5.

The latter change is significant because PHP 5.5 drops support for APC, and I was using APC for both opcode caching at the PHP level and object caching at the WordPress level (thanks to Jaquith’s plugin). Since I’d lost my object cache, I’d also lost my page cache because I was using Batcache. Nice job, Erick.

Almost a year ago, I contributed two small changes to Eric Mann’s WordPress Redis Backend plugin. With Redis already running on my VPS for reasons unrelated to WordPress, it seemed an obvious choice over competing persistent caching options.

I spent some time updating Eric’s plugin (see https://github.com/ethitter/wordpress-redis-backend/commits/master for the fun I’ve had) and sent a massive pull request back with my changes. I’ve been using the plugin for a few days now without incident, though I wouldn’t rush to switch over just yet unless you’re adventurous. I’d watch Eric’s repo if you’re interested in what comes of my efforts.