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Uploading mysql dumps to GoDaddy

by | Nov 28, 2010 | Technology, Uncategorized, wordpress

Strictly a console guy – I’ve been struggling to get the big blog database dumps up to the new hosting. phpMyAdmin claims to support zipped dumps – but that doesn’t work. There are also timeouts in the console for the upload and import.

I finally fixed it by using scp to move the non-compressed dump to the hosting server; and then using the Hosting Control Center to restore the dump as if it was a backup.

It’s running right now – so hopefully I’ll have happy blogs again soon.

Infrastructure – heavy lifting and planning

by | Nov 1, 2010 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

A trio of projects before the year-end – all interwined.

  • Migration of mail from Google Apps to Hosted Exchange.
  • Migration of DNS from current service provider to ‘someone new’
  • Migration of blog/photos to ‘somewhere in the cloud’

Moving the mail isn’t that hard – it’s just making sure that mail doesn’t get dropped while the new MX and CNAMEs are propagating. The old mail will live on in Google Apps – the new stuff in hosted Exchange. The trickier part is making sure that ‘my customers’ get the right service – and can keep getting mail in Outlook or the web. Users eh.

Moving the DNS is part of the mid-term strategy to change ISP. Covad have been great to me since I moved to the US; sadly they are starting to show signs of decay. I need to support additional DNS records than the A, CNAME and MX records – no plans from Covad.

The final push is to move the blog servers out of the ‘home data centre’ and to a reliable, faster provider.

The ultimate aim is to divorce myself from Covad and the Static IP business DSL that has worked so well – and move to something that is much faster – but maybe without the SLA on the line itself.

xCache – PHP caching, performance and stability

by | Oct 18, 2010 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’ve been testing out xCache for a while – primarily as a PHP accelerator.

Early results were really promising – reducing page load times dramatically; and also reducing CPU load as common pages (i.e. the latest blog post and photos) were fed directly from the cache.

There seems to be some kind of memory leak/cache clean up issue with xCache 1.3 – I allocate some amount of RAM for cache (16MB, 64MB, 256MB – it really doesn’t matter) and at some point Apache/PHP starts eating up RAM, then starting to swap – and finally the server grinds to a halt.

xCache is off for now – I’ll keep investigating.