Technology Kills

No need to inform me about the following server issues, which I apologize in advance for:

• CPU time to generate some WordPress and Drupal pages is surpassing 30 seconds. I am actively looking into this and suspect it’s some sort of VPS issue with queue times. This is my top priority.
• Caching is not working properly. No pages are being cached on most of my sites. The pages are still working fine, but because of the above performance issue this can become excruciating. I will have caching working properly by the time the previous issue is resolved.
• Our CDN is not set up correctly. We are using SimpleCDN to host many of our static assets, for performance reasons. It is correctly pulling most assets automatically, however you will notice some pictures in our posts are broken, and other links may not work quite right yet. This is being worked on actively as well.

If you have noticed anything other than these three problems, please let me know so I can work on those as well. I am assessing the entire Digital Empire infrastructure which is why things are taking longer than they otherwise would, but the end result should be a more stable, much faster network.

As a user and lover of both an Android phone and the Mint.com website, I long for the day when I will be able to use the two seamlessly together (without needing to resort to viewing the full heavy-weight website on my phone).

iPhone users have had a Mint.com app for a while, and all indications are that it’s top-notch. Word on the grape vine is that Mint.com are internally testing a new Android application for their service. A full release is likely coming at the end of Q1 2010, but we will be eagerly awaiting more information from the Mint.com developers to confirm or deny that rumor.

As you have likely noticed, my blog is now running on http://technologykills.com.

Links pointing to the old URL of http://blog.benmcclure.com will still work, but will all forward to the http://technologykills.com homepage. To fix, simply change your links to point to http://technologykills.com instead, and they will work like they did before.

If you notice any quirks or issues with the site running in its new location, let me know and I will work to resolve it immediately.

Thanks for sticking with me during this transition!

Yes, finally, with a little help from the cPanel team, I got Apache/PHP to rebuild correctly, and my sites are again working properly!

Of course, I am still working on the slowness issue. Even with page caching, Apache and suPHP thrash the CPU for several seconds the first time a large dynamic page is loaded. I’m trying to narrow this down to either server configuration or a VPS issue.

I have definitely experienced this before on an over-allocated VMware array, so it’s a possibility my web server is just on a busy host box. But I’m still tuning things on the server and trying to minimize the load in every way I can, because more often than not these things are caused by configuration oversight or lack of proper tuning (and user naivety perhaps, in my case).

In a further effort to make all sites and services in the DE network stable and ensure the highest uptime, we have deployed a full-scale monitoring server at an off-site location in Germany.

This means that we can get a full picture of our network and service status at a glance at any time. It also means we are notified when anything goes down, is running slowly, or becomes unresponsive. In addition, we have the ability to automatically bring things back online and resolve some issues without having to wait for me to fix them.

This is a big jump forward for our network infrastructure, and this means we are now running four full network servers in four different datacenters spanning three countries to provide our sites and services under the highest quality and most ideal circumstances.

Let me know what you think! Have you noticed a difference in any of our sites and services? Is there anything you’d like to see, or any changes you’d like made? We’d love to hear from you!

I’d like to sincerely apologize if anyone tried to visit my blog, or any other Digital Empire site, and was not able to get to it.

For the past hour or so, I’ve gotten reports of the site being inaccessible sporadically. I have also seen this myself, as all of my equipment has been down for the past 15 or 20 minutes.

As you can see by this post, the issue seems to be resolved for the moment.

My current service provider is undergoing a management change, and is taking care of some long-standing issues, so hopefully these problems were a result of the firewall finally being set up properly.

My servers already ran great, but it was taking weeks to get any request through. I firmly hope (and expect) to receive better service going forward with the new owners.

I have finally completed moving my servers around to a couple of different providers. This has served me very well so far. My sites are faster, several of my nameservers are on different providers/networks, and I’m even saving money!

Check blog.thedigitalempire.com for more details and additional site news.

After installing a small utility which added a Start Menu icon to my Windows 7 RC machine, suddenly my All Programs collection in the Start Menu went blank.

At first i thought the utility had somehow deleted all of my Start Menu items, but that was not the case. Items could still be searched for and launched that way in the start menu, but not browsed for by clicking All Programs.

I found this post over at Greg’s Cool Thing of the Day blog which describes a “fix” (moving some of the items into one or more subdirectories) which worked perfectly, and all of my Start Menu items have returned.

Thanks, Greg!

I have opened the DEblog over at The Digital Empire, and this site will allow me to keep everyone updated about everything happening within the Digital Empire network (basically everything I do).

This includes news and articles about such sites/services as:

• This one! (benmcclure.com/technologykills.com)
• PC GameSource
• SingularityShift
• Fallout Mod Sorter (FOMS)
• Fallout Games (Returning soon!)
• DigiPress
• And more!

If interested, please subscribe and/or bookmark the site so you can keep up on the latest DE news and happenings!

I have opened a new site in the DE network–the PC GameSource Blog.

For now, this has replaced the official PC GameSource site, which has been under construction for far too long.

I will post articles (usually at least daily) regarding PC games, mods, game tools, developer news, and more. Already posted are articles regarding Wolfenstein, FOMS 2, and the Aion Open Beta.

Look for many more to come! Don’t forget to leave your comments and suggestions on the site, and let me know if you have any issues.