California Road Trip

Granted, it’s not a 7000 mile trek on a 1985 Honda motorcycle, but 1081 miles in a semi-comfortable car is long enough for me. Heading out tomorrow, be back in about a week. Hope to see a few friends along the way.

Day 1
Distance Traveled – 270 miles
Driving Time – 6.5 hours
Location – Pismo Beach, CA
Photos

Day 2
Distance Traveled – 200 miles
Driving Time – 3 hours
Location – Pasadena, CA

Day 3
Distance Traveled – not very far
Driving Time – not much
Location – Manhattan Beach, CA
Photos

Day 4
Distance Traveled – 125 miles
Driving Time – 4 hours (LOTS of traffic)
Location – San Diego, CA

Days 5-6
Location – San Diego, CA

Day 7
Distance Traveled – 500 miles
Driving Time – 9 hours (includes lunch and 2 hours of traffic in LA)
Location – San Francisco, CA

Calling all F1 WordPressers

Any WordPress users at the US Formula One Grand Prix this weekend? If so, I thought it would be neat to meet up and watch either the morning practice session or qualifying tomorrow (Saturday). For the morning practice at 10AM I was thinking about finding a seat in the grandstand at turn 10. For qualifying at 1PM, I think across from the Ferrari pits in the upper section is the place to be. Last year there was some exciting action at the beginning of qualifying. Here is a link to the track map. If you are at the race and are interested in meeting up, please leave a comment and we can rendezvous just before the sessions start. And yes, the picture below is me typing this post at the circuit… I wouldn’t have it any other way.

blogging.jpg

PHP 4 vs PHP 5 Basic Benchmark

I’ve been doing some preliminary research and testing to see if upgrading to php 5 is something we want to do on WordPress.com and if so, how soon. Here are the results of a simple apache bench test of a phpinfo page. The test environment was as follows:

Hardware:

  • Dual AMD Opteron 246
  • 2GB RAM
  • 2 x 160GB SATA drives in a RAID 1 array

Software:

  • Debian Sarge AMD64
  • Litespeed 3.0.3

The tests were run from the same machine running the web server so network latency is not a factor. The test parameters were 5000 total requests with a concurrency of 100.

PHP 4.4.6 with APC 3.0.14
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 5.581265 seconds
Complete requests: 5000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 134854586 bytes
HTML transferred: 134070000 bytes
Requests per second: 895.85 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 111.625 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.116 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 23595.55 [Kbytes/sec] received

PHP 5.2.2 with APC 3.0.14
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 8.388090 seconds
Complete requests: 5000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 183254839 bytes
HTML transferred: 182470000 bytes
Requests per second: 596.08 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 167.762 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.678 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 21334.89 [Kbytes/sec] received

From these preliminary tests, php 5.2.2 seems about 33% slower than php 4.4.6. Surprising…

NOTE: One thing that may contribute to the apparent slowness is that the phpinfo page grew from 26814 bytes to 36494 bytes in the upgrade process.

Has anyone else run similar tests? Are the results the same?

One milllllliion blogs on WordPress.com

picture-6.pngAt 10:56:22PM PDT on 5/23/2007, the 1 millionth active blog was registered on WordPress.com. And the winner is…..

claudiacanals.wordpress.com

Not much there right now, but hopefully there will be soon. Maybe head over and leave a comment on their about page to let them know!

Predictions on how long it will take to get to 2 million?

Additional Capacity

So, I haven’t blogged much lately but there is a reason. Over the past month we have been hard at work expanding the infrastructure behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Here are some of the things that we have done over the past month or so:

  • Migrated out of San Diego
  • Brought online almost 100 new servers in 3 new datacenters — Dallas, TX, San Antonio, TX, and San Francisco, CA
  • Tripled the database hardware behind WordPress.com
  • Now serving WordPress.com blogs out of 3 datacenters in real-time
  • Akismet is now served from 2 datacenters

Here are a couple pictures of some new hardware racked and powered on just before we put it into production last week.

From top to bottom (left):

  • 21 x HP DL145
  • 4 x HP DL365

From top to bottom (right):

  • 18 x HP DL145
  • 4 x HP DL365
  • 1 x 3U HP Storage Array
  • 1 x HP DL385

new-servers-04-2007.jpg

And the back….

new-servers-back-04-2007.jpg

Thanks to Evan League and Brian Maples of Layered Tech for doing the build-out pictured above and sending the photos over.