Month: February 2015 blog archive
Friendly Neighborhood Reminder To Optimize Your Images - 27 Feb 2015

My daughter is a big fan of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and today I was curious who the voice actor was. I found the answer on Angela’s Clues (an 11-year-old named Jake Beale). I also found some pages loading really slowly. I clicked my Google Pagespeed bookmarklet on the projects page and it got the lowest […]

Categories: Web performance
Go vs Node vs PHP vs HHVM and WordPress Benchmarks - 25 Feb 2015

I have been impressed with the performance I’m seeing with Vultr VPSes, so I decided to do an experiment to see what the maximum performance could be. I created a simple Hello world program in Go, Node.js and PHP, then tested them with ApacheBench 2.3. Here are the three programs I used. Go 1.4 package […]

Categories: Web performance,WordPress
Wildcard Site for Laravel Homestead - 24 Feb 2015

Laravel is a fantastic PHP framework. Homestead makes it even easier to do Laravel development. It’s basically a prebuilt Vagrant VM so you can build Laravel projects without having to worry about setting up the server environment first. If you’re not familiar with Vagrant, it’s another extremely useful tool to create easily reproducible development environments. […]

Categories: Programming
Windows 7 Showing the Wrong Thumbnail - 20 Feb 2015

I have a few avatar pictures that I use for web sites I join. We had some new family pictures taken for Christmas, and I cropped and resized some of them to make new avatar pictures. But whenever I used them, Windows Explorer continued to show the entire image as the thumbnail. Windows caches thumbnail […]

Categories: Computers
nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet - 19 Feb 2015

I was benchmarking nginx on a Vultr server and the test ran great, over 17K requests per second, but after a little over 20K requests, nginx would just halt. Memory and CPU usage were nowhere near the limit, and eventually Apache Bench got a timeout. This error occurred over and over again in /var/log/kern.log as […]

Categories: Linux,Web hosting
PHP Truncating POST Data - 17 Feb 2015

A user reported an issue with Shortmarks that he was unable to change the default search engine. Given that the whole point of Shortmarks is to help you search a variety of search engines faster, this was peculiar. I search with Shortmarks dozens if not hundreds of times a day and had no problem changing […]

Categories: Programming