ProjectX Technology

I have been testing the performance of our apache webserver over the last couple of days. Using apachebench I managed to get approx. 80 php requests / sec fetching dyanmic and static pages from apache. The box was really struggling. The load on the machine was over 100 and apache maxed out with 250 processes!

I wasn’t very happy with those results, so I thought I would port our application across to using lighttpd. After a little bit of mucking around with the configuration, I managed to get our application working under lighttpd. The difference in performance was enormous.

The tests shows the following results – approx. 1100 requests / sec for 2K static page and 350 requests / second for a php page! I still wasn’t convinced so I tested a 15K static page and it delivered over 700 requests a second! The amazing thing is lighttpd only opened 5 processes and the load tipped out at 1.5! That’s pretty damn amazing!

To be fair, lighttpd is using fastcgi built in. Still, apache has become very bloated. I configured lighttpd “out of the box” and received a massive performance increase. I have been using apache for a long time and been really happy with the performance. Now I realise that there is a much better way!

Apache is DEAD! Long live the new King – Lighttpd!

We’re proud to annouce that Nick Chapman started working with us this week – he’s writing some of the gnarly ruby extensions for use with our search technology.

Welcome aboard Nick!

I’m moving some pretty big datasets around at the moment – and seeing 120mb data files being uncompressed in a few seconds makes my head spin a bit.

I remember when I got my first 120mb drive – and that was less than 10 years ago.

I’m working away on the executive summary of our first product (coming out early next month). I’m planning to display the summary as a mini slideshow – so I started with some paper-based sketches.

Converting these half dozen A4-sized papers into a cohesive online presentation is a real challenge. It’s easy to focus on font sizes, colors and spacing too early on.

It’s classic Content vs Design. You think that the page doesn’t look right because your fonts are 2px off.

But it’s usually not the font size – it’s your content. Get the content right and the rest comes together.

So.. I’m off to get the content right.

Cartoon from Ok/cancel

<a href=
””http://www.jnd.org”>Don Norman has a very insightful look at Google’s web design in his latest essay – The truth about Google’s so called “Simplicity”

Here’s a snippet from his article…

Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages.

Google isn’t the only one to suffer this fate. I can remember when Amazon had dozens of category tabs on the top of their page. Thank god they fixed that! Amazon have recently added AJAX enabled tabs which let you browse all their categories.

This is a poignant reminder that we all need to be careful in design our interfaces, as things are always going to change!