Geek Alert! Geek Alert! Geek Alert! That’s my way of saying Jon Olson stop reading you’ll bore yourself to death but please till retweet anyways!
The past few hours I’ve been unlearning or relearning a tactic I’ve been using to make things faster. Turns out, you can make it slower by making it faster. Understand that? Neither did I.
So let’s get the story started. Well, we use a super cluster for our hosting. It’s a rock solid, never goes offline type cluster. Super cool right? Well a few days ago I noticed it was starting to act slow*. In fact, everyone did. Not cool.
Come to find out, I’ve been using APC Cache in PHP. Well I was actually over using it. It was slowly eating up RAM in our web servers, and maybe even leaking it. I know in the past bug fixes said it did it, I don’t know if it was or not (I’m not that nerdy). Anyways, all this time I’ve been using it to the max not realizing how much RAM it was using up. And funny enough our cluster is so fast it’s faster NOT using it.
So now I get to go through all the code and decide which places to remove it. Yay! It’s actually not been that bad, but every single time I find it used and I have to rewrite code it’s like a huuuge reminder it was my bad! Thankfully our server people are super cool and don’t get upset when we get on the phone with them and have conference calls with their team only to find out it was me.
The moral of the story I guess is to keep an eye on *EVERYTHING*. Especially when you keep growing like we are, the slightest changes can have the craziest effects. We’re up to 1,330 queries per second on our DB server now. Huya!
*Disclaimer: I put it at the bottom because Jon’s not gonna read this far, but he did tell me it was acting slow a week or so ago but I didn’t notice it so I thought it was silly Canadian internet speeds. I mean c’mon Canada, you should have 31/21 innernets too..
Yeaaaaa Tim! I have no clue what you just said, lol, but I do know that Medal of Honor does work better at those speeds too. So, my conclusion, TE’s are much more awesomer at MOH Speeds too!
Love it!
Sam
Hey, Tim, great post! However, I must confess that I get confused when you used big words like “silly“, especially when connected to phrases such as “Canadian internet speeds“. I`ve had a Canadian internet speed for years and this is the first time I`ve heard anyone refer to it as silly. My internet speed and Jon`s are most likely born of the same mother so I`m pretty sure Jon`s is much like mine. What does silly mean anyway… is that anything like wonderful, blazing fast, super dependableÉ Just wondering.
Cheers!
Hey Tim,
I concur with Sam, that I have ABSOLUTELY no idea what you just said, however, I know it has something to do with whatever you did makes things better and that’s always a GOOD thing! However, I agree completely, You never stop learning. In fact, I am always seeking out and try to learn something new everyday that I can apply. And speaking of code, I actually figured out how to go into my C-panel and change some code, I NEVER would have known how to do that, if my friend, Emily hadn’t of showed me how. Anyone who says, once you get out of school, you are done learning is a fool!
Hi Tim,
First off I am going to hold my hand up and say I have no idea what most of this blog post was about…I get the general idea but you lost me somewhere in the Gamma cluster at about the time you engaged the super-fast APC.
I will say this though the general point you seem to make is that you actually slowed the whole process down because you were trying to go too fast.
And that reminded of your excellent quote from our recent round table chat when you said that the fastest way to succeed on the internet was to slow down!
Patrick.
P.S. While I don’t always understand all the super tech stuff you write about I always enjoy reading it nevertheless.
Hi Tim, Its awesome that you are always on the ball when it comes to serving your customers and keeping TimTech in tip top shape.
I confess I was getting frustrated trying to work while things where
sloowwwinggg down. But I love TimTech Products and your diligence
keeps me coming back for more.
Greta Job Tim
May I need to proofread before hitting that send button
I hate mis spelled words lol.
I`m very surely am not a geek but I hear what your saying. Everything has to be done just right.
And Canada don`t seem to worried about speed they`re more concerned with bandwidth usage. The plans available here are very expensive just to get speeds of 7-15 mb/s. Some areas cannot even get 7 mb/s from most providers in older cities like Windsor, Ont. .To get speeds of 30 or more everyone would surely go broke with the rates the way they are now and stupidest thing is the providers say their networks wouldn`t be able to handle it- Personally I think the providers are greedy, they should quit making excuses, spend some money and fix it. In addition they should lower their rates too, and that`s all I can say to them.
Have a great day Tim.