Today I can officially welcome two glittering stars to the Ozblogistan firmament — Helen Dale, aka skepticlawer, and Legal Eagle, have decided to team up to establish a new blog to be hosted here at Ozblogistan.
This is very exciting — both of these ladies are excellent writers on a wide variety of topics with a legal focus. I expect that the new site will blossom into something of a must-read in the very near future.
I got an IM from a friend complaining that he couldn’t reach his ozblogistan site. I jumped into an SSH window and discovered that the system load was well north of 50. In non-nerd terms, this translates as “very bad”.
The culprit is PHP. This service is set up with a division of labour between the web server, which handles the front end of things, and copies of the PHP engine which Wordpress Mu relies on. What is supposed to happen is that every X requests, a given copy PHP engine will shut itself down and restart. This is meant to ensure that everything is clean and stable in the long run.
Except that it isn’t working that way at all. PHP unfailingly manages to start up the new copy of itself, but thoughtlessly manages to overlook the killing-of-original-copy part. So after a few days of this the server looked less like an orderly room of cleanliness and more like a petri dish full of angry bacteria on crack.
Right now I have a temporary fix in place whereby each copy of PHP is made to hang around for a great many requests before trying half successfully to die-and-be-reborn. We’ll see if I can solve this little conundrum before things really take off.
I spent most of a weekend getting Wordpress Mu (aka WPMU) up and running this site. It was a mixed experience.
WPMU is a modified version of Wordpress designed for hosting many blogs on a single server. It’s the software which drives the Wordpress.com service.
That’s the blurb, anyhow. As it turns out, Wordpress.com have a bunch of custom code which they haven’t quite shared completely. Such as the nifty code for domain mapping. But that’s neither here nor there.