Time to fix my site’s performance

The fact is that my blog is basically pathetically slow.

It’s running on an under-powered machine, with a relatively slow hard drive, a VM that’s also hosting a lot of other sites.

They’re all running on a platform for which I have much love, but which is now more than 20 years old.

I think in the short run I can split this site off onto another VM and get marginally better performance. But without either a substantial hardware upgrade (RAID or SSD storage), or a time-consuming and probably link-rot generating migration to another platform/service, it’s not going to get a lot better.

2 Comments

  1. Steve Kirks said:

    I don’t see much of an issue from my end, other than the CSS seems to load last…

    February 14, 2013
    Reply
  2. Jake Savin said:

    Thanks, Steve. It definitely gets slow sometimes – usually because it’s hiccoughing when Frontier saves its object databases.

    I changed that from once a minute to once every 5 minutes, which helped, but the save can still take some time. It depends mostly on how busy my disk gets, and how long it’s been since the host machine was rebooted. (It rebooted this morning for OS patching.)

    Generally though there are two big issues here:

    1. The content isn’t safe, since it’s trapped inside a legacy database.
    2. It’s also not safe (and can load slowly) because it’s not static. I can’t slam a bunch of Apache instances in front of it to make it scale. And I can’t migrate the data to Joe-random’s (cheap) static hosting service.

    I’ll deal with all this at some point…

    February 14, 2013
    Reply

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