lighttpd and nginx are silly says to try to reduce load

[Hell Puppy]

Good stuff for us tech heads.

I'm guessing most people today just openly trust that their hosts' SAs are competent.

I'll say this, even the most sloppily configured apache will rarely be the source of your bottle neck on today's web. If it is, you've got a good problem to have (lots of traffic).

When I see sites running like a slug today it's usually some piss poor database design and config with some sloppy PHP running on the front of it.

[raymor]

Originally Posted by Hell Puppy

When I see sites running like a slug today it's usually some piss poor database design and config with some sloppy PHP running on the front of it.

Absolutely. How many times have you seen pretty much this exact same code, just with
with the variable names changed to protect the cluless:

$query = "SELECT name, subject, message FROM contact";


while($i < $max)
{
$result = mysql_query(SELECT thing, thang, thung from stuff WHERE id=$i);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC);

echo "Name :{$row['thing']}
" .
"Subject : {$row['thang']}
" .
"Message : {$row['thung']}

";
}

Umm, excuse me Mr. "programmer", wouldn't that run 500 times faster if you did the
query once instead of 500 times?:

$result = mysql_query(SELECT thing, thang, thung from stuff WHERE id < $max);
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))
{
echo "Name :{$row['thing']}
" .
"Subject : {$row['thang']}
" .
"Message : {$row['thung']}

";
}

and you know none of the tables have any indexes.

Originally Posted by Hell Puppy

I'm guessing most people today just openly trust that their hosts' SAs are competent.

Yeah I'm hoping that in the next conversation between host and webmaster when one
of them suggests "let's add another pointless proxy web server onto this machine" the
other will reply "how about commenting out the 85% of crap we're currently running but
not using instead". Competence doesn't seem to be any more common in the hosting
industry than in so many others. Sure there a few knowledgeable people, but we regularly
spend significant time educating hosts on the basics.