Is lighttpd faster than Apache? Can Wordpress handle high traffic websites? Rumors spread like wildfire on the web, and sometimes it’s hard to separate the truth from evangelism and clever marketing. Today I’m going to put Wordpress to the test, running under Apache and lighttpd, and see if a clear winner emerges. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the first in a two part series where I’ll be describing how to load test a web server. In this post I’ll go over some basic load testing concepts and get everything up and running. In the next post I’ll compare the performance of two popular web servers (Apache and lighttpd) running a popular content management system (Wordpress) and explore how performance can be improved. Read the rest of this entry »
I was cleaning out some files on my PC and came across a paper that I wrote for a philosophy class a few semesters ago. Not surprisingly, the philosophers I read had difficulty finding moral justification for our current Intellectual Property regime.
Briefly, the paper argues that Intellectual Property rights can only be justified as a “recipient rights.” A bearer of a recipient right is entitled to some reward, but it’s difficult to determine the form of the reward, or who the duty-bearer is (e.g. who should pay them). Since IP can’t be justified as anything but a recipient right, it is unethical for right-bearers (IP owners) to demand retribution from a particular individual. Thus I, as an individual, do not owe the RIAA anything. If I download an MP3 they cannot ethically demand payment from me (by suing me, for example).
You can download the paper here [HTML Version].
In this post I’m going to describe how I got Alex King’s popularity contest Wordpress plugin to work with WP-Cache2. If you’re not interested in how it works, you can skip reading the article and just download my modified version of popularity-contest.php [pretty-printed version] that you can put in your plugins/popularity-contest directory replacing the original file. Make sure you delete your old cache files after installing it to get things working right away.
Update: Make sure you check that your feeds still work after the plugin is enabled. The PHP engine may try to interpret the XML declaration at the top of the file, causing a scripting error. If this happens you can tell WP-Cache not to cache your feed by adding /feed (or something else that matches your feed’s URL) to the list do not cache list under the WP-Cache options. If you really need your feeds cached, you could add some logic to popularity-contest.php to fix the problem.
I do a lot of web development work, which usually doesn’t require a lot of knowledge of low-level networking details. But from time to time it becomes necessary to work below the HTTP protocol, to debug a broken remote procedure call, or reverse engineer a third party ajax app. These tools make many low-level networking tasks a breeze. These are all command line utilities, by the way, since that’s where I’m most comfortable.
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