6 Ways To Kill Your Servers – Learning How To Scale The Hard Way
Good article over at HighScalability.com about what happens when a coder, even an experienced one, has to scale out a web site under time pressure.
The most important lessons in my opinion are caching, tweaking configuration and stress testing.
No 404 page when using a static front page
I was setting up a wordpress blog (latest version, 2.5) a couple of days ago, and added the great plugin Google XML Sitemaps. I wanted a static frontpage with a couple of blog posts below it, so I modified the Kubrick theme a bit (added another template to use for that page, no biggie).
When taking a look at Google Sitemaps (somewhere under Google Webmaster Tools) I found that WordPress didn't respond to non-existing pages with a 404 not found, but all my pages after each other, rather like the posts on a dynamic front page.
Again I thought - no biggie! I modified the 404.php template to begin with the following:
<?php
ob_start();
header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
...
Still, no luck. Then I saw that WordPress didn't even read the 404.php page! I tried turning off the static front page and voilà, 404 works okay again.
I've searched a bit for this in the WordPress forums, but I'll report a bug ticket for them. Hopefully it will work in the next release 🙂
Newsflash:
It only works this way if you haven't chosen a "Posts page". Maybe it's just an undocumented feature?
Symfony development with XAMPP on Windows
This is how I set up my windows laptop for development with Apache/MySQL/PHP/Symfony (XAMPP with Symfony).
- Download XAMPP Installer package.
- Install XAMPP - this is really just a case of next -> next -> okay.
- Since I'm not only using my laptop for development I chose not to start any services except for XAMPP when windows starts.
- Start (from XAMPP Control Panel) Apache and MySQL (and whatever other services you need).
- Add PHP to your PATH.
- Right-click "This Computer", choose properties.
- Advanced tab -> Systam variables (not sure, my system is in Swedish 😉 )
- Add C:\xampp\php;C:\xampp\mysql\bin (if installed in default location) to the PATH variable.
- Upgrade Pear - pear upgrade pear
- Find Symfony - pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
- Install Symfony - pear install symfony/symfony
- Done! Start playing around...
Symfony Project
Symfony är ett PHP-framwork som verkar riktigt nice. Finns även en del bloggartiklar här och där som tipsar om bra sätt att göra saker på.