Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

I’ve decided the time has come to move several sites out of my spare bedroom and off this box and onto a shared host somewhere. I probably should have done this years ago, but there’s something nice about having a server you can personally reboot or stick a CD into when necessary. I need to be able to serve three sites:

• xom.nu (static HTML)
• The Cafes (WordPress)
• www.elharo.com (static+WordPress+custom PHP)

These sites are not mission critical, but I would like them to stay up. Reliable backups that I can download periodically are a must. I would like them to respond much faster than they do currently. (Xom.nu is pretty fast, but the two blogs can be dog slow at times.)

Traffic is not too heavy, though I don’t track hard numbers. I would like to be able to quickly ramp up to withstand a Digg effect if necessary.

These sites can all live on the same IP address. (They do now.)

I’d like the flexibility to install my own Apache modules and custom PHP extensions and modify the various config files such as httpd.conf and php.ini. Ideally I’d like to be install other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or eXist if I feel like playing with them. That is, root access to the box would be very helpful, even if it’s virtualized. However I can probably live without that if it raises the price too high. Alternately, I could perhaps live with 24/7 phone support from a reliable sys admin who can make changes like that for me. However the ability to install and manage my own WordPress extensions and modified code is a must.

Any suggestions? So far here’s who I’ve looked at:
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Just a little Google fodder. Should you encounter this uncommon error message when trying to compile or run a Java program:

$ javac -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/ClassNotFoundException: error in opening JAR file /usr/local/java/jre/lib/rt.jar

it means that your installation of the JDK, and likely your original download is corrupt. Delete it, download again, and reinstall. This can occur with essentially any Java program: the interpreter, the compiler, jar, or a program merely written in Java such as LimeWire.

For reasons that aren’t especially clear, this bug seems to occur most frequently on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon when running in a virtualized environment such as VMWare. At least those seem to be the common factors for everyone else I found with this problem when googling it myself.

Used to be you could surf Amazon completely without cookies. They’d feed you a cookie if you were naive enough to take it, but you didn’t have to accept it. You could still browse, add items to and remove items from your shopping cart, checkout, pay, and do anything else you wanted to do without any cookies at all. That was a very important characteristic given Amazon’s penchant for tracking users and data mining.

The Amazon site wasn’t completely RESTful–without a lot of JavaScript I don’t think any consumer site could be given both the browser vendors’ and the W3C’s failure to implement simple features like HTTP logout and forms that PUT and DELETE–but it did better than most.

However about a week or two ago something changed, and it now seems impossible to do more than browse without accepting their nutrition-free cookies. They seem to be going through a site-wide redesign. This is a definite step backwards. Given that they were already maintaining sessions (without cookies) before, I’m not sure if this will have a negative impact on their scalability. Nonetheless, it’s disappointing.

I’m still finding this site to be unmanageably slow at times. One other trick that’s been suggested is to install eAccelerator to cache the compiled PHP scripts. (WP-cache only caches the output pages.) I’ve now done that. At first glance it does feel like a dramatic speed-up, but we’ll have to see how it handles under load. Please holler if anything seems broken.

The install was shockingly easy for a Unix server program: took me about ten minutes total including time to write this entry. That’s less time than it took me to install PHP in the first place.

Things do seem to be faster, though I’m still seeing occasional timeouts requesting pages. I really wish there were some decent profiling and logging tools that could tell me exactly where the system is bottlenecking.

I’ve upgraded Mokka mit Schlag and The Cafes to WordPress 2.2.3. This means I’m now using WordPress’s built-in Atom 1.0 support instead of my own hand-rolled plug-in. Please holler if you notice any problems.

As fond of Blockbuster’s online service as I’ve been since I first signed up with them about two years ago, (I’ve rented 516 movies from them and have over 700 more in my queue as I type) it’s become obvious that it’s time to say goodbye and try NetFlix. Blockbuster has been getting progressively worse for months, and it’s not just the usual problems with poor customer service. It’s becoming obvious that they are in deep technical trouble, and they cannot dig themselves out of it. Their development staff is simply not able to fix their problems.
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