Saturday evening I went to see Akron Symphony perform Holst’s The Planets plus some other works, including a piece with Sō Percussion. I like The Planets and was glad to see it performed live, especially, as an EVN fan, Mars. The Sō / David Lang piece I found hard to follow and understand the apparent polyrhythms involved. The other pieces I liked well enough.
performance posts page 2
My 10k Apart entry is now officially deployed, meaning it made it onto the gallery list (was on page 2, but disappeared again) and I have a URL to request an update.
Continue reading post "#1269"10k Apart: Deployed
My 10k Apart entry was finally deployed and can be seen at its Azure URL, though it’s not in their gallery yet. There were problems deploying it, and it took several tries and back and forths with Aaron Gustafson himself to get it working.
Continue reading post "10k Apart: Deployed"Got moved to a new server in a new datacenter by Dreamhost this weekend. Seems to be significantly faster than the old one for first page load, like an order of magnitude. It’s more in line with what I get when testing locally. I assume the server I was on was just overloaded. It had often had a load average in the 6’s or 7’s. I had been wondering what was wrong and if I should swtich to VPS. This one’s been at less than one. Hopefully it stays snappy and doesn’t get too loaded up over time.
Dreamhost now has PHP 7, so I’ve switched my main sites to it. Seem at least slightly faster.
On my site, I’m using Apache’s ‘mod_deflate’ and ‘mod_filter’ to compress my compressible responses (mostly text), with a setup based on h5bp’s server config. I got my sites running over HTTPS recently, and today, when looking at my site performance with webpagetest.org, I noticed that my content wasn’t compressing. It was still working fine over HTTP. I noticed in h5bp’s comments that <IfModule mod_filter.c> could be removed in Apache versions below 2.3.x. I removed it, and sure enough, compression was working again. I’m not sure why it’s different depending on what protocol I use. Perhaps Dreamhost has separate versions of Apache running for the two protocols. Or perhaps it’s just something different about the configuration in the virtual hosts. Regardless, it’s working now. I just hope this doesn’t cause problems whenever they move to Apache 2.4.
Symfony AppCache: built in reverse HTTP proxy
I finally set up my site to work with Symfony’s built in HTTP reverse proxy. Took a little bit of time since I had to fix a couple minor bugs in how things are set up with my symfony-initial and Symfony Standard Edition Bundle and then made a mistake in testing whether or not it was working that made me think it wasn’t when it was.
One useful way to test if it’s working is to set the ‘debug’ option of AppCache to true (turn this back off for production). This will set an X-Symfony-Cache header that will provide info on the cache behaviour. You can see these headers on the shell by running curl -I your.url. If it says ‘fresh’ as part of the header value, that means it was served from the cache. If it shows the header at all, that means AppCache is being used.
For the cache to work, the response must be public and have something set to control how the cache becomes stale. See Symfony’s docs on caching for more details. Since my content rarely changes at the moment, I went with the Cache-Control header with max-age. A cool thing about using Symfony’s reverse proxy is that the entire cache will be cleared when clearing Symfony’s cache like normal. This means that if you make a mistake and must remove it from the cache, there is a quick and easy way.