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ABOUT ME AND THIS WEBSITE About me and this website. Hello, I’m Don Melton, probably best known as the person who started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple. These days I’m just an aspiring writer and recovering programmer. I live in the Republic of California with my wife, son and various creatures—some of which are also family. ARCHIVES - DON MELTON A record hang gliding ride on the Texas wind. Suicide reporting on the Internet. Safari is released to the world. Older dogs and newer tricks. When your house is burning down, you should brush your teeth. Ignore that bogus RSS feed entry in Google Reader. A more accessible Macworld 2003 keynote video.HOW TO CONTACT ME
How to contact me. I won’t expose my email address here to spammers, but you can send a message to “me” at this domain. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Mention me on Twitter and I’ll notice quickly as long as I’m awake and not engaged elsewhere. For questions about my Video Transcoding tools, open an issue so the rest of the community can OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS NOT OVEROUR NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVERTHE LONG NIGHTMARE IS OVERAMERICA S LONG NIGHTMARE IS OVERAMERICA S LONG NIGHTMARE IS OVERLONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE QUOTETHE LONG NATIONALNIGHTMARE
Our long national nightmare is not over. I have faith in Joe Biden. And Kamala Harris. They’re good people. They and the team they’ve selected know what they’re doing. It’s obvious just listening to them. So I can barely wait for them to take over the White House tomorrow. Because real governance will be back in residence. WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE Welcome to my website. I think this may be the third or fourth weblog I’ve started. I forget. Most of them are lying somewhere in the HTML bin of history. God willing they’re all buried deep in there. I don’t want to see them again. And you shouldn’t either.MEMORIES OF STEVE
Anyway, I do remember Steve’s seriousness and apparent impatience that day. But not a thing he said. After I started at Apple in June of 2001, I saw Steve at a few on-campus events, company meetings, walking between buildings and such. You could also see Steve sometimes in the company cafeteria, Caffè Macs. ALMOST FAMOUS, NOW FOR TRANSCODING Hardware-based transcoding, e.g. Intel Quick Sync Video, is a great solution for real-time applications like video conferencing. But at the moment it means lower quality when applied to your disc collection. Of course, that may change someday. In the meantime, everyone needs to calm the fuck down. SAFARI IS RELEASED TO THE WORLD Safari is released to the world. During the early development of Safari, I didn’t just worry about leaking our secret project through Apple’s IP address or our browser’s user agent string. It also concerned me that curious gawkers on the outside would notice who I was hiring at Apple. Other than a bit part in a documentary aboutNetscape
WHY I RETIRED FROM APPLE Why I retired from Apple. Today is the one year anniversary of my last day at Apple. It’s Sunday now but it was a Friday back then. And that evening I was given a very warm sendoff by my crew and many others at the Fruit Company. Several folks on the Safari and WebKit teams produced a video in order to more thoroughly embarrass me. DON MELTONABOUTCONTACTARCHIVESSUBSCRIBEDON MELTON OBITUARYDON MELTON HOME INSPECTORDONALD MELTONDAVID MELTON FACEBOOKMICHAEL MELTONyears
ABOUT ME AND THIS WEBSITE About me and this website. Hello, I’m Don Melton, probably best known as the person who started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple. These days I’m just an aspiring writer and recovering programmer. I live in the Republic of California with my wife, son and various creatures—some of which are also family. ARCHIVES - DON MELTON A record hang gliding ride on the Texas wind. Suicide reporting on the Internet. Safari is released to the world. Older dogs and newer tricks. When your house is burning down, you should brush your teeth. Ignore that bogus RSS feed entry in Google Reader. A more accessible Macworld 2003 keynote video.HOW TO CONTACT ME
How to contact me. I won’t expose my email address here to spammers, but you can send a message to “me” at this domain. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Mention me on Twitter and I’ll notice quickly as long as I’m awake and not engaged elsewhere. For questions about my Video Transcoding tools, open an issue so the rest of the community can OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS NOT OVEROUR NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVERTHE LONG NIGHTMARE IS OVERAMERICA S LONG NIGHTMARE IS OVERAMERICA S LONG NIGHTMARE IS OVERLONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE QUOTETHE LONG NATIONALNIGHTMARE
Our long national nightmare is not over. I have faith in Joe Biden. And Kamala Harris. They’re good people. They and the team they’ve selected know what they’re doing. It’s obvious just listening to them. So I can barely wait for them to take over the White House tomorrow. Because real governance will be back in residence. WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE Welcome to my website. I think this may be the third or fourth weblog I’ve started. I forget. Most of them are lying somewhere in the HTML bin of history. God willing they’re all buried deep in there. I don’t want to see them again. And you shouldn’t either.MEMORIES OF STEVE
Anyway, I do remember Steve’s seriousness and apparent impatience that day. But not a thing he said. After I started at Apple in June of 2001, I saw Steve at a few on-campus events, company meetings, walking between buildings and such. You could also see Steve sometimes in the company cafeteria, Caffè Macs. ALMOST FAMOUS, NOW FOR TRANSCODING Hardware-based transcoding, e.g. Intel Quick Sync Video, is a great solution for real-time applications like video conferencing. But at the moment it means lower quality when applied to your disc collection. Of course, that may change someday. In the meantime, everyone needs to calm the fuck down. SAFARI IS RELEASED TO THE WORLD Safari is released to the world. During the early development of Safari, I didn’t just worry about leaking our secret project through Apple’s IP address or our browser’s user agent string. It also concerned me that curious gawkers on the outside would notice who I was hiring at Apple. Other than a bit part in a documentary aboutNetscape
WHY I RETIRED FROM APPLE Why I retired from Apple. Today is the one year anniversary of my last day at Apple. It’s Sunday now but it was a Friday back then. And that evening I was given a very warm sendoff by my crew and many others at the Fruit Company. Several folks on the Safari and WebKit teams produced a video in order to more thoroughly embarrass me. WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE Welcome to my website. I think this may be the third or fourth weblog I’ve started. I forget. Most of them are lying somewhere in the HTML bin of history. God willing they’re all buried deep in there. I don’t want to see them again. And you shouldn’t either. WAITING FOUR YEARS TO EXHALE Today is a good day. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has been inaugurated as our 46th president. And Kamala Devi Harris as our 49th vicepresident.
BE STILL MY BEATING HEART Be still my beating heart. In early November, just about a month ago, I woke up tired. I’m old so this is not really out of the ordinary. I still got out of bed, did my business and then took the dog outside to do his. Pro tip: always go yourself before you have to stand around waiting for someone else to unload. Anyway, tired. ALMOST FAMOUS, NOW FOR TRANSCODING Hardware-based transcoding, e.g. Intel Quick Sync Video, is a great solution for real-time applications like video conferencing. But at the moment it means lower quality when applied to your disc collection. Of course, that may change someday. In the meantime, everyone needs to calm the fuck down. UNDER NEW CONTENT MANAGEMENT Under new content management. Today I returned to my roots and replaced the WordPress installation here with free-range, handcrafted, artisanal HTML, this time statically generated by Nanoc. More on why I made that change later. For now, please take note of these caveats:REMEMBERING PENNY
This is one of my favorite photos of Penny. She’s hard at work on one of the three chores she loved best, sniffing. The other two being eating and sleeping, of course. WHEN I FIRST HEARD THE NAME “SAFARI” When I first heard the name “Safari”. Ten years ago this month, my secret Web browser team at Apple became the “Safari” team—less than 30 days before we debuted the product on January 7, 2003. To this day, I don’t know who suggested the name “Safari.”. I wasn’t in the room when the heavens split asunder and angels sounded KEEPING SAFARI A SECRET Keeping Safari a secret. For much of the time we spent developing Safari—long before it was called by that name —it pretended to be Microsoft Internet Explorer. Specifically, Internet Explorer for Mac, which Apple had provided with the OS since 1998. Less than six months before Safari debuted, it started pretending to be a Mozilla browser. THE MOVE TO WORDPRESS AND THE TRAFFIC THAT FOLLOWED On Tuesday evening, I converted this self-hosted site from a collection of simple, static HTML files to a full WordPress content management system. And on Wednesday it received 93,112 page requests. Not the most my site has handled in a single day, A PODCAST ABOUT THINGS YOU PEOPLE WOULDN’T BELIEVE Back on September 7 of last year, I sent Rene Ritchie and Guy English an email titled “Some ’80s films for your consideration.” This was shortly after our popular “Dune” podcast (and before the always insightful Matt Drance would join us to discuss “RoboCop”). At the time we were trying to come up with another geek movie to blather on about for 90 minutes.DON MELTON
Just another Web geek playing with the Web* About
* Contact
* Archives
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SWEET SIXTEEN FOR SAFARI AND WEBKIT On June 25, 2001, I arrived at Apple Computer to lead the effort in building a new Web browser. It was also Ken Kocienda ’s first day on the job, both at Apple and on that same project with me. For that reason, Ken and I have always considered our start date to be when Safari and WebKit were born. Not any other position on the calendar. Only June 25, 2001. We were there. We should know. Sorry to belabor the point, but every few years I need to clarify exactly when that birthday was because someone from outside the project mistakenly thinks the anniversary is a random internal milestone we passed later on. Ugh. Please never do that. Anyway, I’m proud of the work Ken, myself and the other original team members put into the project. And I’m just as proud of the effort by everyone else who’s worked on it since then. It’s a delight for me to see the current Safari and WebKit team still kickingass.
So, happy sixteenth birthday, folks. Keep going. Sunday, June 25, 2017HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU?
For some strange reason I checked the temperature today in Brawley, California, one
of the many small towns in the Imperial Valley where I grew up. It’s over 110 degrees Fahrenheit there as I write this. With a forecast for 123 degrees later today. The folks in Brawley sure know how to celebrate the summer solstice, don’t they? Tragically, this assault on the mercury is not all that odd for June in the Imperial Valley. Just wait until July if you want to see some really lethal weather. I live in the Bay Area now—thank god!—and I’m always amused when people panic or think they’re being punished if gets over 90 degrees. Seriously, folks? I wear a hoodie for 10 months of the year around here because it’s so pleasantly cool. And by “cool” I mean when it’s 72 degrees or less. Now I can take the heat a little more than some, but I’ll admit 123 degrees is really fucking hot. When I was a kid in Brawley during the summer, we just didn’t go out in the middle of the day—that being after 9 a.m. or before 7 p.m. No, sir! Even the stupid children stayed inside hugging their air conditioner vents. But 123 degrees? Step outside in an atmosphere like that and it’s as if someone rolled a Buick into your chest. Never mind that your lungs would be on fire if you could actually breathe then. Still, it’s the rapid change in temperature from leaving the safety of even moderately cool interiors that will knock you on your ass. Or worse, send you tumbling forward unconscious for a face plant on pavement that might as well be on fire. I’ve seen this happen to people multiple times. It’s not pretty. And realize that it’s not just eggs you can cook on the sidewalk when it’s that goddamn hot. You can pretty much fry a steak, too. So, fellow Bay Area residents, please stop complaining about the weather. It’s not that bad. Yet. Tuesday, June 20, 2017 THAT BLEEPING KERFUFFLE After I posted that linkto my
latest podcast with Rene Ritchie , several folks alerted me via Twitter that all my colorful metaphors had been “bleeped” on the audio. I didn’t realize that because I hadn’t listened to the recording myself. And I don’t normally listen to my own podcasts because… that’s just sort of creepy, isn’t it? Obviously, that means I don’t mix the audio either. I don’t do that because 1) I don’t have relevant experience at it, 2) I’m really lazy and 3) fine folks elsewhere do all the hard work for me. My apologies if you didn’t get the whole “Melton” experience you were expecting. Rene tells me that episode was an accident and our next podcast won’t be censored. “Let Melton be Melton,” as he likes to say. Plus, we might just release an explicit version of thecurrent show.
Has everyone calmed the fuck down now?1 OK, here’s the thing—I was not upset _at all_ about beingcensored.
The show might be called “Melton” but that’s only because 1) Rene Ritchie is a generous man, 2) I’m vain and 3) we couldn’t think of a better name after we recorded the first episode. I consider the whole enterprise as something Rene and I do together. It’s _our_ show. Not _my_ show. If anything, I’m the co-host. This is exactly why I call Rene (and Kelly Guimont for our “Westworld” podcast) “boss.” I’m
not trying to be funny, ironic or insult them. I’m reminding myself who really is in charge. And who does all the hard work. Seriously, I just talk into a microphone, folks. And it’s a microphone that Rene gave me! A really nice Røde Podcastermodel, too.
Talking is easy and I continue to be amazed that anyone out there cares about listening to what I have to say. I’m honored that all these nice people enable me to broadcast my various musings, opinionsand rants.
So if Rene and anyone else at iMore —or Jason Snell and anyone else at The Incomparable —decide to censor my many and frequent vulgarities, it’s their call. They’re thepublishers.
And being censored won’t damage my “brand”—whatever the hell that means. (Actually, it scares me thinking about what that means.) Yes, words matter. Exact words even. But the truth is that some people—whether they admit being offended or not—have difficulty listening to vulgarities. Especially at the pace I spew them. A friend of mine told me he’s sad that he can’t listen to my podcasts in his car anymore now that he has kids. I get it. There are valid reasons to hit the buzzer. As anyone who’s adventurous enough to follow me on Twitter knows, I’m saltier than most sailors. I don’t plan on changing that there or on this website. But if someone needs to filter me a bit elsewhere, I’m fine with that. -------------------------*
A tired catchphrase which really needs retirement. I should know. ↩ Sunday, June 18, 2017 PETER ABERNATHY SPEAKS Anyone who listens to me on other podcasts1 knows that I
might be, oh, just a bit fanatic about “Westworld.” And my
favorite performance from the very first episode—among an array of other favorites—was by veteran character actor Louis Herthum.
His unsettling but riveting performance as Mr. Peter Abernathyin one particular
scene _still creeps me the fuck out!_ All the while sitting naked like a piece of machinery oposite Sir Anthony Hopkinsand Jeffery Wright
.
That’s some acting chops, folks. And apparently Hopkins thought sotoo.
Anyway, Herthum has been pretty quiet all year until Sarah Rodman of the Los Angeles Times sat him down for an interview. And not just about “Westworld”—the man continues to have a full andfascinating career.
But Herthum did manage to spill the beans that filming for the second season will begin—yay!—in July. Also, now we know what Jeffery Wright really said to him as he shuffled into cold storage. Here’s the video—not violent but still a delight. Via Westworld Watchers.
-------------------------*
That’s a link to “Greetings from the Uncanny Valley” hosted by Kelly Guimont and co-hosted by me. We’ll be cranking up the re-watch shows any day now, so be sure to joinus! ↩
Friday, June 16, 2017 MY REACTION TO WWDC 2017 Episode number 12 of the whenever-the-hell-we-feel-like-recording-it “Melton” podcastwith Rene
Ritchie and I is now available. At least—as of this posting—it’s available on Overcast . Apparently the iTunes podcast crawler justcan’t keep up
.
This episode is called “Zero regression” where we discuss my reaction to WWDC 2017, the continued awesomeness of the Safari and WebKit teams, HEVC transcoding and that new bullshit book about iPhonehistory .
Enjoy.
Friday, June 16, 2017 UNDER NEW CONTENT MANAGEMENT Today I returned to my roots and replaced the WordPress installation here with free-range, handcrafted, artisanal HTML, this time statically generated by Nanoc . More on _why_ I made that change later. For now, please take note of these caveats:*
My RSS feed has moved back to https://donmelton.com/rss.xml but you should be automatically redirected there if you’re using the old WordPress URL. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to update your subscription bookmarks.*
Theconfused.
*
If you subscribed to my old comments-only RSS feed then you should’ve already noticed there haven’t been any new comments in over a year—I disabled that feature—and after today’s update, that feed URL now answers to the name “404 Not Found.” But please enjoy the bonus content I included on the new “Not found” page.
*
Several other URLs—mostly WordPress-generated paged archives for the main index and various years, months, days, etc.—also respond with “404 Not Found” now rather than a redirect to https://donmelton.com/archives/. This is intentional because I want those pages removed from search engine results soon.*
Search results here are once again provided by DuckDuckGo . However, I’ve added a handy “Favorites” section to the top of my “Archives ” page so you can easily find popular essays like “Memories of Steve.”
*
My “How to contact me ” page has reverted to an intelligence test where you suss out my email address. Sorry, but I removed the WordPress-generated form which challenged users to include _their_ email address—a task which was sometimesproblematic.
*
The new—and far simpler—CSS here should still provide a responsive and mobile-friendly presentation. Please let me know if that’s not the case.*
The absolute minimum of engineering effort was put into support for legacy Web browsers. But please let me know if your evergreen browser—i.e. Safari, Firefox, Edge or Chrome—doesn’t seem to render contentcorrectly here.
*
While I do employ Darth Google for Web analytics, I finally added an 'anonymizeIp' line to the JavaScript tracking snippet, making at least the appearance of trying to protect your privacy. So, after all that work moving this website to WordPress—much of it documented here—why am I moving back to static HTML? And why use Nanoc instead of my own generator, Magneto?
Well, I’m a dinosaur who couldn’t make the transition to the highly-regarded, Web-based editor in WordPress. My writing workflow starts in BBEdit —my preferred text editor for the last 25 years—formatted as Markdown. With WordPress, I
wound up pasting my posts into its editor afterwards and then cursing—even more than usual—while I translated them to Texturizeformat.1
That said, WordPress does work as advertised and it’s simpler to maintain than most people think. For the most part, it even updates itself—especially with fixes for critical security vulnerabilities. But my big problem with WordPress was performance. Using this website while logged into the WordPress dashboard was excruciatingly slow—often a three-second or longer wait for each page. And without being logged in—even with the WP Super Cache plugin enabled—each page took over twice as long to load as this current static website does. And Gramps don’t like sloth. I suppose I could have written my own WordPress theme to help solve some of the performance problems, but after looking at the design requirements I decided the easiest solution would be returning to a static generator. Seriously, writing a good WordPress theme is anon-trivial effort.
As for Nanoc, five years of contributions from multiple developers have made it faster and more capable than Magneto, a poorly maintained project from a single knucklehead (me). Plus, Nanoc doesn’t suffer from the my-way-or-the-highway design that plagues so many otherstatic generators.
In retrospect, I think I installed WordPress just so I could play with it. But playtime is over now. Back to work. -------------------------*
Yes, I know there’s a Markdown plugin for WordPress, but it has…issues. ↩
Thursday, June 15, 2017 ALMOST FAMOUS, NOW FOR TRANSCODING Last week at the Beard Bash(thanks, Jim
and Rene
, for the invitations) I was surprised by acknowledgments from some other attendees—not the attention itself, but how they recognized me and what they wanted to discuss. It was delightful. During those rare occasions when I visit developer conferences or parties, I usually just blend in with the hobo-nerd style of everyone else. So other than being obviously older than average, I don’t stand out in a crowd. Blandness is an underated superpower. Take note,flashy mortals.
Anyway, I would say something out loud at the party—usually to my wife because she attends these events with me—and invariably someone would join in with, “Hey, are you Don Melton?” And then ask me about… no, not Safari and WebKit… my Video Transcodingproject. Seriously.
It seems that my voice, after blathering on so many podcasts for the last few years, is now quite distinctive to some of you. Maybe it’s my demented-gorilla laugh that gives me away? I don’t really know. Along with thanks for doing the project—and that appreciation is much appreciated—questions about transcoding came from both home enthusiasts and professionals. There was also quite a bit of discussion about High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which
the Fruit Company announced support for earlier in the day. Here are a few things I said to the nice folks there and to some others later online:*
There’s no such thing as an archival transcoding. That’s not what transcoding is for. It’s about portability. And it’s always a tradeoff between quality and size. Not to mention time. Your original DVD or Blu-ray Disc rip is your archival version. Storage space is cheap. So don’t throw away your original rips.*
Stop trying to mimic Netflix engineering if you’re only transcoding your home disc collection. You don’t have the server farm or time to spend on that. This is exactly why I created the transcode-video tool. Even its default settings will deliver high quality at a reasonable speed without overheating the planet.*
Hardware-based transcoding, e.g. Intel Quick Sync Video, is a great
solution for real-time applications like video conferencing. But at the moment it means lower quality when applied to your disc collection. Of course, that may change someday. In the meantime, everyone needs to calm the fuck down.*
HEVC/H.265 is clearly the future. It will eventually replace H.264 as our preferred video format. But that doesn’t mean such a future is here yet for home transcoders. The open source x265 encoder is making rapid progress, but it’s still not entirely practical for that domain. And it remains to be seen whether the HandBrake, FFmpeg
or Libav
teams will integrate Apple’s HEVC implementation. My guess? Not anytime soon. So I totally geeked out at the Beard Bash but with _transcoding_ geeks this time. It was worth it—even having to drink all that Heineken. Monday, June 12, 2017 DESIGN BEFORE YOU “MINIFY” In a fit of frustration the other evening, I posted this on Twitter: I’m not really a curmudgeon, I just play one online. And apparently folks are watching my show because that one-off rant received a lot more “likes” and “retweets” than I was expecting. But some were confused by what I meant. So I’ll explain. That vulgar epiphany came to me while I was measuring the embarrassing sloth of this website1 and examining the sluggish behavior of quite a few others. Obviously I shouldn’t cast the first stone, but there’s a lot of unnecessary bloat elsewhere out there, too. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use tactics like minification, resource
concatenation, server-side compression, etc. to improve
performance.
But have a strategy for performance first. Have a design. Consider whether you need all those libraries you’re tempted to include. Consider whether you need to write even more JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Christ-knows-what-all to “improve” the user experience. Maybe leveraging those Content Delivery Networks will let you get away with it. But maybe they won’t. Then again, what the hell do I know? I’m just an old Web browser guy. So I’ll leave you with this quote, sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, that I kept in my .plan file back when that was a normal thing to have around: > Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. I’m just trying to get people to think a little bit more _before_ they deploy. I certainly wish I had here. -------------------------*
I’m currently over-burdened with a relational database, a resource-hungry theme, complicated plugins and other dynamic functionality I’ll probably never use. So I’m seriously considering a return to just static HTML. ↩ Sunday, May 21, 2017 INTERVIEWED BY A TWELFTH GRADERSo, this happened
.
I was interviewed by David Silverman this week. Nice kid. And considering all the high-quality exchanges from other people on his site—some by friends of mine—I’m really impressed that David is still just in high school. He’s going far. David had some really clever questions, too. I wasn’t expecting, “You are trapped on a desert island…” But it’s not like he was the Spanish Inquisition, either. I was allowed to answer via email so I could craft the responses myself from my comfy chair. I’m just particular that way. All in all, a good experience and much better than my last phone interview. Thanks, David. Friday, January 1, 2016 THE MOVE TO WORDPRESS AND THE TRAFFIC THAT FOLLOWED On Tuesday evening, I converted this self-hosted site from a collection of simple, static HTML files to a full WordPress content management system. And on Wednesday it received 93,112 page requests. Not the most my site has handled in a single day, but still atypical. All without anydowntime, too.
Now, moving to WordPress had nothing to do with all the traffic. That was just a happy testing and validation accident. The traffic surge all started with a post to Hacker Newsby someone I’ve
never met. And I didn’t even notice the event until 8:45 that morning when their post made it all the way to the front page. The funny thing is, this was a link to something I’d published and (mostly) forgotten about on Sunday. It was three days old by the time it got any real attention. Go figure. Then sometime early Wednesday afternoon, John Gruber linked to the same page on DaringFireball
.
Rene Ritchie piled on later with alink from iMore
(and some damn good commentary). And other folks started linking to itas well.
Through it all, my server just kept humming along, not showing any significant memory load either. What enabled all this reliability from a little WordPress blog? Just some common sense, really. But I can thank Guy English for at least one suggestion. A few weeks ago when I first considered moving to WordPress, I noticed that Guy was using DreamHost for his blog, kickingbear . Since I also use DreamHost (they’re good people) and Guy’s blog was a WordPress site, I was curious if he had done anything special to survive his last Fireballing by our friend John Gruber. The big difference in Guy’s configuration from mine was him using a virtual private server(VPS) instead
of shared hosting. Good idea, I thought. Sure, it’s a little more expensive but there’s much more isolation that way, preventing the Apache HTTP server from getting too distracted. Guy also suggested installing WP Super Cache, a plugin for
WordPress. But I already made that a requirement. I’m not grotesquely stupid. Nobody should ever run a self-hosted WordPress site without some form of static page caching. The other strategy I applied was a content delivery network(CDN) to
offload stylesheets, scripts and images. This was easy since I was already using MaxCDN for my static site and WP Super Cache has built-in support for rewriting internal resource URLs to point at CDNs instead. One thing I didn’t try was moving from FastCGIto XCache
for
PHP. I simply don’t have enough experience to know if that’s an advantage for WordPress, or the configuration tricks in making such a transition. But if you do, please comment on this post or contact me . I’m not above admitting ignoranceor asking for help.
While 93,112 page requests seems like a large number for one day, it’s really only a little faster that one page per second on average. And the number of simultaneous users probably never got over500.
A more stressful day on the site is still needed to shake things out and assuage all my fears about reliability. But this is a good start. And a real incentive to write more. Saturday, December 26, 2015Older posts
Hello, I’m Don Melton , and I started the Safari and WebKitprojects at Apple.
These days I’m just an aspiring writer and recovering programmer. Follow me on Twitter and GitHub.
Listen to me via iTunes and find me on other podcasts from iMore and The Incomparable.
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Copyright © 2012–2017 Don MeltonDetails
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