Me Blog!

As I will be off to college on Monday I won’t have anywhere near a fraction of the time that I used to for messing about with all my various servers here. I figured it would make a lot more sense to consolidate my various sites onto the one machine if at all possible.

So first up was the retirement of my IIS server on which my tech blog used to reside. I have migrated that blog over to WordPress and it along with this blog and my main site have been relocated on to a new Debian 64bit server which was previously the already mentioned IIS server.

The migration also meant that I could catch up on some tweaks that I had long been putting on the back burner. As my main site is running Mediawiki I have configured the new server so that Mediawiki now uses memcached to help speed up queries and reduce hits to the database. It has had a bit of an effect already. in keeping with the desire to reduce queries on the database I installed Donncha’s excellent WP Super Cache plugin on both WordPress blogs. To give an idea of the difference that made a quick benchmark was called for.

Using Apache Bench I made requested a blog entry 100 times over 10 concurrent connections:

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://tech.sweetnam.eu/2008/06/even-intel-wont-touch-vista/

Without WP Super Cache the results were 20.72 seconds to complete with 71.47kbytes/sec

With WP Super Cache the results were 2.287 seconds to complete and 658.38kbytes/sec

However there is a caveat with those results as each test first passed through my reverse proxy but nonetheless the results are pretty conclusive. Another configuration change that I made that may skew those results is that I have disabled Apache logging on the web server. As all traffic first passes through my reverse proxy I use its logfiles for analysis. Interestingly from another test I tried recently, disabling logging on Squid Cache had absolutely no effect on its performance!

With everything now happily in place on the new server it was time to shut down and power off both of my Sun Machines. They will be ressurected for anytime I wish to play with Solaris. My mailserver remains running on my Poweredge 2800 although I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Zimbra today.

After all todays tweaking and migrating I am now left with my Smoothwall firewall performing NAT, my reverse proxy which I decided to keep up and running as it is outstanding for filtering unwanted traffic, the new web server and my existing mail server.

It’s probably still a tad excessive though! Next up is to change the theme for this site as I can’t configure the sidebars and the search option is strangely missing!