this space intentionally left blank

I started poking around the WordPress site, looking for hints on optimizing page rendering performance. There’s the usual bit of flaming going on in the forums, in fact when I read one thread with two people arguing about whether MySQL was a real database in which one of the parties claimed that all real databases, i.e. Oracle, did most everything meaningful using stored procedures, I thought for a moment I had travelled back in time and was reading Usenet.

After determining the database queries weren’t likely to be too bad with the size of my blog, though the queries and schema could probably use some optimization, I read that wordpress itself is the more likely bottleneck. I happened across Andy Skelton’s post about poorly coded themes, and thought this Sandbox theme sounded interesting.

Now I’ve never been too big on writing web pages, it always seemed too much like drudgery to me, but this CSS thing is pretty cool. Separating your model/data/text from the view/presentation, well, I spend a lot of time on things like that at work and think it’s an interesting class of problem. So I figured I’d take the opportunity to learn a bit more about CSS, and you know, it’s almost like coding, but without all the pesky comments. I had previously hacked up a CSS theme by changing the header background picture and some of the colors, but now I figured I’d port my hacked theme to the Sandbox, which is a skinnable, generic wordpress theme.

I’m partway there now, and now that I’m reading and learning what all those funny tags mean and how they relate to the php theme and the rendered page, I’m fixing a few of the things that always bugged me about my theme. I have another wordpress install I use to test things out, so you can check out my progress if you’re curious.

About the only thing that’s bugging me enough to keep from taking it live is the secondary sidebar stuck down at the bottom after the main content area. The primary sidebar uses absolute positioning, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it. I’ll check one of the other themes to see how they handle positioning the contents relative to the sidebars, but it will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

As if Dreamhost’s well-publicized problems during the last three weeks of July weren’t enough to frustrate a shared web hosting customer such as myself, with a single humble domain hosting a couple of lightly-used blogs and a photo gallery, lately my shared hosting server, happy.dreamhost.com, has been sluggish at best, and frequently just dead to the world. I’ll share a few statistics that are probably interesting to no one but me, and maybe the few other people who read or use the web services on auroralux.net:

Longest uptime I can remember for Happy in the last several days: 14 hours
Highest load average I’ve seen in the last 24 hours: 650
Number of support emails sent to Dreamhost: 5
Number of responses: 3
Number of responses with helpful information on my problem: 1

It’s a very interesting time for me to have these problems with my web hosting provider, since I’m just under three weeks shy of my annual renewal date. I figure it’ll take a good 48 hours for domain name services to propogate, and I’ll probably double that for good measure, so I at least know I have several more days before I really have to decide whether to renew with them. The biggest advantage I have is my hosting needs are fairly lightweight, so I could host this site pretty much anywhere.

I’ve been researching web hosting in general and some specific ones that seem well-regarded, and now question Dreamhost’s policy of providing a very cheap shared web hosting solution with high disk space and bandwidth limits. The bottleneck isn’t the bandwidth or disk in this case it’s the CPU.

Say for example the front page of my blog consists of 21 kilobytes of data, a conservative estimate. In order to use up my current bandwidth limit of 1317 gigabytes per month, I’d have to have 62,717,272 page views on my blog per month. Looks great! I doubt I’ll ever receive that many page views unless I have the misfortune to be slashdotted. I’d need 24 page views per second on my home page to use up the available bandwidth on my website. Wow!

Dreamhost is very vague about CPU resource utilization on their shared hosts, and I don’t know how many other customers I share happy.dreamhost.com with, but I’m confident that if my website were serving 24 page views per second, I would be adversely affecting the performance of the shared server, so the high bandwidth limit LOOKS like a great deal, but the type of website I host is unlikely to ever be able to use it without grinding the poor shared server to a halt, a scenario that looks suspiciously like what’s happening right now on happy!

I can’t imagine I’m alone in the desire to run Darwin Calendar Server on Panther or Tiger.

I also can’t imagine I’m alone in being disappointed at the apparent lack of production-quality clients.

Finally, how about faster hosting for this project? This thing is GLACIAL!