A national radio campaign is likely to bring hundreds or thousands of visitors spread over hours, not hundreds of thousands of visitors spread over seconds, so I probably would not take any particular action to harden a site in anticipation of it. It is a poor use of engineering resources and adds technical risk with no corresponding benefit. (n.b. Pasting code you got from a blog post, particularly code marked as kinda broken, is not a risk-free endeavor! I love nginx, don't get me wrong, but paste in snippets from two different blog posts and watch the sparks fly if you don't understand how nginx handles, e.g., location priority.)
> I love nginx, don't get me wrong, but paste in snippets from two different blog posts and watch the sparks fly
This week where I work I have witnessed much the same with Apache2.
The problem: They have a new Wordpress install, want to redirect an existing site path to Wordpress, and want to ensure that the performance rivals that of the existing site.
Before I could get them to just change the Netscaler rules and add a simple Wordpress add-on that creates static files from dynamic, they had cargo-culted their way to a glorious solution that involved leaving all of the routing in place but reconfiguring Apache using mod_proxy, mod_rewrite, and proxyhtmlurlmap such that requests for static items get munged through the static web server, sent off to the Wordpress server, re-written on the way back, and then served up in-place of the existing file.
They literally have an Apache conf that is the sum of 5 different blogs. And they don't understand how it works, and how it is in other ways broken (they can't login to wp-admin anymore, but hey... it's OK, they can copy the Wordpress database from staging).
This has also taken them 2 weeks to achieve.
When asked why they didn't just change the routing rules, add Varnish and configure Wordpress to know what domain it's on (so they don't have to rewrite anything), they simply shrugged and explained that it's working now.
PS: If anyone wants a technical co-founder in London, or an Architect/CTO level person who can hire good people and build good teams. Please speak to me. I'm not sure I can take the madness of working for other people much longer.
I see WordPress blogs down all the time. You don't need radio campaign to kill it, sometimes a tweet is enough.
Uncached WordPress instance in the article could handle no more than 100k visitors spread over 3 hours (and that's assuming no spikes).
Of course adding such config last minute is a bad idea, but nobody should be setting up uncached WordPress for more than a few friends in the first place.
Not to mention that he's compromising on accuracy. Yeah, 1 second is tiny, but why give it up if you don't have to? Especially those of you reading who want to try this on a potentially more dynamic site.
Edit: downvoted with no explanation, cute. And readers here think they're above Reddit standards.
There's no reason to compromise the integrity of a system to any extent before you have to. As others have demonstrated, that need was clearly not met here.
downvoted with no explanation, cute. And readers here think they're above Reddit standards.
Downvoting with no explanation is arguably acceptable here. There's disagreement about it, but people do it all the time, including me when I don't have time to type in a comment or feel like doing so would add more noise than signal (like, probably, right now). Complaining about being downvoted, though, definitely is not.
Once upon a time, downvotes tended to stop at 0 or -1 for things that were perhaps just mistaken or misguided rather than outright mean/trolls/antisocial.
People should care a lot less about downvotes, and, votes in general. I bump up comments that were clearly downvoted to express disagreement. That's the fix to this problem, not trying to convince 1000 casual users to change the way they use the downvote button.
That's how I generally express my satisfaction with businesses, but sometimes just "never eating here again" is too generous to the restaurant that served you food with hair...
How can explaining why you downvoted, when nobody else has, add more noise than signal, unless your opinion is not worth sharing in the first place? And if your opinion is not worth sharing, why is it worth a downvote?
Let's be honest - we downvote here because we disagree, just like very other site.
That's a good enough question that you've provoked me into figuring out what I think about this.
Adding words takes up space. A downvote doesn't. Therefore a downvote is more lightweight, therefore there are times when it's more appropriate than a comment. It's an in-between gesture, partway between silence and verbalization. I like that subtlety. It's an especially good way to express disagreement with something one feels is not only wrong but also somehow debasing. A comment doesn't have to be rude to be debasing, it can just be mediocre or somehow crass, nor is one always able to say exactly how. Those are cases where fostering more discussion is unlikely to do good and it's better to hold one's tongue. But downvoting still gives a signal to the original commenter as well as to other readers that someone's not ok with what was said. I think that's meaningful, and also that it's fairly rare to see people abusing that signal. It does happen, but more often when someone thinks they don't deserve it, it's kind of obvious to others that really they do. So when it happens, the best way to respond is with a touch of self-honesty. Maybe you'll come out roses but just maybe you'll notice something worth correcting.
One other thing about downvoting. I think what makes it controversial, and also interesting, is that it's an emotional expression. (Upvotes are too, but downvotes are stronger.) That explains why people get upset about it, have strong opinions and so on. But it also explains why it's a good thing to have around. There are very few emotional channels available to us that don't require proximity. It also explains why it's wrong to say that downvotes are inferior and should be replaced by comments. Imagine if people were forced to put every emotional gesture into words. It would be impossibly ponderous. And we'd end up talking about nothing else.
The basic problem is that the OP motivated his decision to do what he did, while you just said that he were wrong without motivating why that second matters so much for him.
OP found a solution that worked for him, and then shared that solution to give other people with a similar problem the option to use the same solution. That is a good thing even if it doesn't apply everywhere. People are not sheep that copy things without reflecting on how it applies to them before implementing.
(Well - perhaps some are, but there are plenty of even more stupid stuff out there for them to copy, so this solution to OP's problem will hardly make this problem worse)
I didn't downvote you cause I don't have the downvote arrow, but I probably would have done so if I had had the ability to do so.
> Not to mention that he's compromising on accuracy. Yeah, 1 second is tiny, but why give it up if you don't have to?
While NGINX may use very little CPU and have minimal hard drive access, PHP (or Java/Python/Ruby/etc.) will hit those resources hard.
Look, I'm not one of those environmentalist wackos who pisses his pants when somebody forgets to turn off a light ... but ... if you're keeping your BLOG server a hundred times busier than it has to be just so that your users don't experience a staleness of 1 second ... you're an asshole. A military or medical application, fine. But a blog? Sorry, no.
It's not about whether he has a point, it's about calling others assholes. In face-to-face conversation there are lots of ways to do that without being strident; in writing it's too heavy-handed. Scrupulously avoiding such aggressiveness is one of the few easy things we can do to prop up the discourse.
