That’s a hard question to answer. This was posed via the Contact form on my site.
I’ll try to approach this from my original idea down to what it has become (and may expand in to).
GeekLAN Then
GeekLAN was originally owned by a good friend of mine. It’s purpose was to create a website for a couple AZ-based geeks to fool around with outside of our numerous get-togethers for gaming. I took over ownership of the domain when registration lapsed (and strangely, no one snatched it up).
After taking the domain over, I had an intention to follow the original vision of the site, but expand it further into a ‘world-wide’ community (Yeah.. social website) for geeks. Specifically, those that wanted to get together and game or.. whatever. This idea was on the move for a good six months before I decided to give up on it. I realized it was to large of a project to tackle completely on my own, and good developers don’t come cheap (not withstanding the fact I couldn’t afford one).
GeekLAN Now
The site sat dormant for a good 3 months before I decided to start up a blog and talk about general geekery. Two things became readily apparent (and they remain true - but I’m working on it!):
- I’m not a good writer
- My grammar leaves much to be desired
- I don’t have many interesting things in mind to write about
The few posts I’ve made so far have been an absolute blast to put together and write. And I used to hate writing.
As you can see, that hasn’t stopped me. I’ve been taking the time to read posts at Write To Done, just to get ideas and a better feel for how I should approach new posts. It’s a lot to mull over and even more to take it. I’m taking notes from the site and using that appears to be appropriate in any given situation.
When I getter a better feel for things, I’ll decide wether or not GeekLAN is going to get buckled down to being a niche-specific blog or just a general ‘whatever goes’ type of blog.
GeekLAN Soon (maybe)
I’m still not completely sure where GeekLAN may go in the future. If the community grows enough, I may put some effort into bringing the community aspect of the original design into play. Most of the general code is written and ready to go. I just need a reason to continue fleshing the idea out and make it happen.
Why don’t you tell me how I’ve done so far? I’d love to hear from each and every one of you that happens to visit this little unknown hole in the wall.
That’s all for now.
I spent a few hours over this weekend trying out different gallery plugins. My requirements were simple but I stayed flexible and installed plugins that didn’t meet those requirements;
- Must not require a secondary application install (Gallery, CopperMine, et al)
- Must not require extensive modification of file-system permissions
- Must be simple to manage from an administrative stance
- Not exactly a must - Widget desired
Below, you will find my (short) list of Gallery plugins I gave a run.
I’ve spent a good amount of time messing with Apache today, trying to tweak performance out of it. After attempting to run Apache Benchmark against this WordPress install (both remote and local), I noticed I was topping out at 13-14 requests per second.
Strangeness, indeed.
I spent about 15 minutes messing around before I discovered that all I was getting back with AB was some headers. For some reason, apache was having a hell of a time returning the headers. Strangeness. This time I then ran AB against my APC Status script. 400 requests/second. That’s far more reasonable than 13-14 requests per second.
What the hell is going on?
I still haven’t figured that part out yet.
Running ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.geeklan.com/ still only returns 13-14 requests per second. I can tell the site is running better than that, but AB just isn’t getting to it. It’s literally only able to pull down headers. If I kick off a wget against the domain it pulls down proper, fully-loaded index.
I’ll be working on this a bit more tonight - maybe I’ll figure out why it’s misbehaving.
And no, specifying geeklan.com/index.php doesn’t help.
UPDATE:
This is very interesting. When utilizing AB, I get this in the log file;
[Fri Feb 22 22:25:00 2008] [error] [client 64.41.145.110] PHP Warning: sem_release(): supplied argument is not a valid SysV semaphore resource in ***/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 116
(*** is me hiding the real path)
UPDATE 2:
Fixed that by setting $use_flock to TRUE in the wp-cache-config.php file. This still has not fixed what apache responds with to AB. There are now no entries in the error log. I’m completely stumped at this point.
UPDATE 3:
Okay, now THIS is weird. I sat back for a second and thought, ‘Okay, so ab doesn’t show what it’s getting as headers.. AH HAH! strace!’
Here’s what I ran (and an excerpt from the log):
strace -o trace.log ab -n 1 -c 1 http://www.geeklan.com/
And the output that caught my eye;
write(4, “GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: www.geekla”…, 90) = 90
read(4, “HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently\r\n”…, 8192) = 255
Now THAT has me stumped. wget, links, lynx nor any browser I can throw at geeklan.com catches a 301 Redirect off of the page and I know that WordPress doesn’t do any form of retarded redirects (let alone a 301). This sorta smells like an apache issue, but I’d see the same if I ran it against test.php or some of my other benchmark files. This happens even if I specify /index.php
Blech.
UPDATE 4 (Final):
Turns out it was, in fact, wordpress. I’ve got WordPress setup to run as http://geeklan.com/ and requests to http://www.geeklan.com/ were 301′d to http://geeklan.com/. Ugh. At least I know what was up. Here are some fun stats from Apache Benchmark:
ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://geeklan.com/
Requests per second: 384.43 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 260.122 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.601 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)