Tag Archive for ‘tech’ at T. Longren

Tag Archive for 'tech'

Dreamhost Has A Slow Network

Published

on September 8, 2006

. 0 Comments Tags: blog, downtime, Dreamhost, dreamhost-down, dreamhost-outage, longren.org, network, outage, tech.

The issues I spoke about in Poor Site Performance probably aren’t related to any content within this site, as I had previously thought. It’s more likely related to the shabby state of Dreamhosts network.

I am now blaming the Dreamhost network for the poor performance of this site for the following reasons.

1. Intermittence: This one is simple. Sometimes single posts will load in a snap. Other times they take up to 30 seconds to display. Same with the index page, archives, about, and contact pages. The contact and about pages are relatively void of content. There’s really no reason for slowness or lag when loading those pages, there’s not much info to display there.

2. Other Pages: Other pages at the longren.org domain also load slow at times. Take Mint for example. The Mint dashboard fails to load or loads very slowly when this blog is also responding very slowly. It takes up to a minute to refresh some very basic peppers from within Mint.

3. MySQL Is Usually OK: If I’m not mistaken, Dreamhost has it’s MySQL databases on separate servers. In other words, a machine that serves http requests doesn’t server MySQL data at the same time, another entirely separate box would handle the MySQL responses. My thought here is that Dreamhost might have their MySQL serving machines on a different network entirely, one that might not be having issues the rest of their network is experiencing. I could be way off here though, entirely speculation.

The Dreamhost Status site has been unavailable for most of the day. There’s normally a blog hosted there. Currently, there’s simply a few paragraphs of text explaining the current situation:

Network downtime Monday Night (09/11)
Monday night, we will upgrading our core networking equipment, which will result in some downtime of all services lasting approximately 30-45 minutes.
We’re expecting this to put an end to the network problems that were created by the power outages about a month ago..
- Sep. 8, 2006 3:30 p.m.

Oops! Temporary Status Site
We had a little goof and this will be our status site until the other machine can be resuscitated.
- Sep. 8, 2006 11:40 a.m.

So, as you can see, they’re relating this to the downtime experienced a month or so back when a generator caught fire. Hopefully the work they do on this coming Monday will fix the issues we’ve been having. It’s getting real old, real quick. Couldn’t happen at a worse time too, this site is starting to grow by great leaps and bounds. Hopefully growth won’t be affected by this poor performance.

UPDATE: This site was unreachable for about 12 hours lastnight/this morning. Here’s some new items that have been posted to dreamhoststatus.com:

Wilmington Failed Over
Wilmingtons second network card, which carries internet traffic, decided to give up the ghost. The server is on shiny new hardware now and websites are already starting to serve again. Our apologies for the downtime.
- Sep. 9, 2006 1:24 p.m.

Web Control Panel Issue Resolved
The network issues causing slowness for the web control panel for the web control panel have now been resolved. The network overall is more responsive and we will continue to make minor changes to keep everything working as well as possible. The major maintenance on Monday night will be essentially a complete replacement and upgrade of one of our core routers. In the meantime, we have been re-routing as much of our network traffic as possible through our other core router to improve overall performance.
- Sep. 9, 2006 2:48 a.m.

Web Control Panel Slowness
The network issues are also causing problems with the Web Control Panel for several users. We are looking into this and hope to have everything restored shortly.
- Sep. 8, 2006 8:56 p.m.

Network Problems Today
We have been experiencing Network Problems today. These problems are the same problems that have actually been happening since we first reported problems with our network. Unfortunately these problems have gotten worse today and are causing a majority of the downtime and slowness issues you are reporting today. These problems, and our attempts at fixing them, have been an ongoing effort. The maintenance Monday Night will be a big step towards resolving these problems completely. We are currently working on the network and all servers having problems and hope to improve the situation soon. Sorry about the downtime, we hope to have this all resolved soon.
- Sep. 8, 2006 5:45 p.m.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Slackware 11.0 Release Candidate 4

Published

Tyler

on September 5, 2006

in Linux and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: Linux, Open Source, operating-systems, slackware, slackware-11, tech, technology.

Slackware 11.0 Release Candidate 4 is out! This release sees kernel 2.4.33.3 included as the default. Soon after RC4 was made, Patrick made another small update to the ChangeLog:

Sun Sep 3 19:59:47 CDT 2006
a/udev-097-i486-8.tgz: Fixed a missing ‘[’ in rc.udev. Thanks to
guilherme for pointing out the error, and to J., who found the missing
‘[’. (It had fallen off my desk and ended up under a table)
kernels/System.map: Forgot to gzip a bunch of these. Thanks, Steve’o.

This should definitely be the last RC before Slackware 11.0 final is released. In the past two or three Slackware releases (10.0, 10.1, and 10.2), we’ve only seen 2 or 3 release candidates. I suppose there’s a chance we’ll see RC5 this time, but I’m thinking this RC4 will be the last. Probably see Slackware 11.0 final within a week and a half or so.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Slackware 11.0 Release Candidate 3

Published

Tyler

on August 25, 2006

in Linux and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: Linux, Open Source, operating-systems, slackware, slackware-11, tech, technology.

Slackware 11.0 Release Candidate 3 is here!! The 2.6 kernel was moved from /testing/ to /extra/. What’s that mean? Not much really, other than it’s considered to be more stable since it’s now in /extra/.

Head on over to the Slackware Blog for more details.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Slackware 11 Feeling Official

Published

Tyler

on August 18, 2006

in Internet, Linux and Personal

. 1 Comment Tags: Linux, Open Source, operating-system, slackware, slackware-11, tech, technology.

Slackware 11.0.0 is really feeling “official” now for me. Yesterday, Patrick made an update to the -current ChangeLog stating he had bumped the /etc/slackware-version number up to 11.0.0. I had been waiting for him to bump that version number up. Now that he’s done so, I know Slackware 11.0 will be out soon. I am excited.

Popularity: 3% [?]

CSS Optimization Tools

Published

Tyler

on August 17, 2006

in Internet and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: apache, blog, blogging, css, css-optimization, mysql, optimization, optimize, PHP, tech, technology.

Optimization can drastically change the way your websites load. Poorly optimized sites load slowly and aren’t very nice to look at for the users. Well optimized sites load quickly and provide the user with the content they need. There’s lots of different ways to optimize site performance. You can optimize apache, mysql, PHP, and even your HTML code.

One thing people often overlook when optimizing a site is the CSS. Blogging Pro takes a look at four different CSS optimization tools. I, for one, have never really thought of optimizing CSS. I just don’t think it’s really ever occurred to me, I need to work on learning CSS before I get into optimization. But, there’s tools to do the optimizing for you, go check out the article at Blogging Pro.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Digg Assigned To ECommerce Class

Published

Tyler

on August 17, 2006

in Internet, Personal and Strange

. 0 Comments Tags: digg, social-bookmarking, social-sites, tech, technology.

Par!x received an interesting comment yesterday. Apparently, the commenter is taking an e-commerce class. An assignment for the class involves signing up at Digg and submitting articles/comments. This of course intrigued Par!x so he sent the commenter an email asking for some more details about this assignment. Here’s whats involved in the Assignment:

“Digg activity. You’ll need to create a Digg account and become an active member. As a minimum, you’ll need to do the following by lesson 35:

1. Submit at least three stories directly related to a topic from class. To count, articles cannot be ‘dups’.

2. Comment on at least ten articles. To count, a comment must say something intelligent and represent a complete thought.

Digg Grade. If you meet the above two actions, you will get a grade no lower than a C. For this assignment, I will give the highest grades to those with the most Diggs on their submitted stories as well as an evaluation of the quality of your submitted comments. I also encourage each student to ‘digg’ other submitted articles by cadets in Mgt 392—be generous by digging submitted articles from fellow students. On lesson M13, I will provide an initial, 50-point progress grade of your Digg activity. Final Digg activity is due M35. On lessons M13 and M35, please send me an email containing the URL to your Digg profile page.”

Those students with the highest amounts of diggs will receive the top grades. Sounds like it’d be an interesting class, but I’m not sure how this exactly relates to ecommerce. I’ve taken a few ecommerce classes and it’s the same basic stuff every time, B2B, B2C, etc. There’s really not much “ecommerce” involved with digg.

Par!x is gonna be doing a follow up post at some point, I’m patiently waiting for more info.

UPDATE: Par!x posted an update with the students Digg identity. Looks like she’s been pretty successful so far. I bet she gets one of the top grades in that class.

Popularity: 3% [?]