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Building a Simple PHP Twitter Client Without Twitter October 18th, 2008

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Part One – Getting to Grips with GNIP

Okay so now I suppose I better start doing some geek stuff as its been far too long. What I’m going to try and accomplish is to build a simple Twitter client using PHP and GNIP and as little help from the Twitter API. Sure this may fail badly but we’ll learn something along the way. Why Twitter? Well I do lots of stuff with Twitter data, so why not. But I also want to demonstrate the power of GNIP to you as well as showing that there are ways to be friendly to Twitter & other providers without having to hammer their API’s.

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Impresive MySQL stats August 3rd, 2008

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So I’m doing something that relies on MySQL a lot. Last night I had to test a rebuild process that we would use if there was a failure in our systems. Worst case secnairo would be we would have lost about a weeks data and need to reinsert the whole lot.

So I wrote a quick and nasty PHP script with multiple nested foreach() loops, yeah I know what your thinking, but as I said, it was a quick and nasty script. Basically all this script done was parse a directory full off XML files and based upon the content, perform multiple SELECT, INSERT or UPDATE based on the data per element in the given XML file.

So, on my little iMac (24″, 4GB RAM, 1TB Drive) the following are the stats from the completition of the script.

Total Processing Time: 4975.59566307 seconds.
Total DB Inserts: 1,961,000
Total Selects: 12,035,743
Total Updates: 10,465,071

This all translates to;

Inserts Per Second: 394.12
Selects Per Second: 2,418.95
Updates Per Second: 2,103.28

Keep in mind, I was watching a movie at the same time and that there has been no optimisation carried out on the server at all (Although the DB is fairly well normalised). Table format was MyISAM.

Now imagine what MySQL could do on an optimised Linux server with custom optimisations to make it faster. I am quite impresed given the workstation I was working on and the complexity of the queries we are doing. Pat on head for MySQL. Well done.

Testing Wordpress Super Cache Performance on SLES 10 SP1 using Siege November 30th, 2007

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I was reading a post by Donncha recently on the new Wordpress plugin, WP Super Cache. He mentioned that he did not know what the performance would be like, which got me thinking about running my own tests to see for myself (I was doing some basic ones anyhow for another idea I had). There are many bloggers using Wordpress whom do not know one technical thing (nor should they!), but they should know what its gonna be like for them when their site gets busy.

N.B. My intention here was to just see what would happen. This should not be regarded as a complete proper test, but rather an indicative one. I had limited time and was not arsed doing this 100% correctly.


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