We’re working with web site preparing for massive growth. To make sure it handles large data sets as part of the process we work on generation test database of significant size as testing your application on table with 1000 rows may well give you very dangerous false sense of security. One of the process web [...]
PHP Sessions – Files vs Database Based
One may think changing PHP session handler from file based to database driven is fully transparent. In many cases it is, sometimes however it may cause some unexpected problems as happened to one of our customers. If you use file based sessions PHP will lock session file for whole script execution duration, which means all [...]
Using LoadAvg for Performance Optimization
Linux and Unixes have excellent metric of system load called “loadavg”. In fact load average is is 3 numbers which correspond to “load average” calculated for one five and 15 minutes. It is computed as exponential moving average so most recent load have more weight in the value than old one. What does Load Average [...]

