A couple notes from the past few days of tweaks and fixes:
- Hyper-threading has a huge effect on LAMP performance.
- From now on, I’ll have bad dreams about running MySQL without Query Caching in the way that I used to have nightmares about going to school wearing only my underwear. The difference is that big.
- WordPress rocks, but it has some queries that will kill large databases. I’m playing with baseline when I fix ’em, but it’s worth it.
- Being highly ranked for searches related to bears and bear lovers on the weekend that Grizzly Man airs on TV is both good and bad: it doubled my previous high for daily page-loads, but killed my server and taught me some lessons about sloppy coding.
- The support techs are Lunarpages continue to pretty much rock.
- Having friends who cut their teeth on high-performance PHP/MySQL and are willing to spend the night workshopping it with you is indispensable.
- It’s hard to beat the calming beauty of driving home through a snowfall on back roads at 2 AM carried by your life’s soundtrack.