B-Rhymes used to be pretty slow, so in the last month I’ve made a lot of optimizations to make it serve up near-rhymes faster than ever. I’ve:
- Rewritten the entire site with Kohana (a PHP framework), switching from Django (a Python framework).
- Made a ton of web optimizations as advised by YSlow. eg. gzip, image optimization, cache configuration etc.
- Streamlined things, getting rid of unnecessary JavaScript, and added paging so you don’t have to wait for all the rhymes to come in before you can see it.
But after doing all that it was still slow! not all the time, just sometimes. See, I was on what’s called a Virtual Private Server (Cool people call it a VPS), meaning I was sharing a big web server with lots of other people (it being “Virtually Private”, ie, not private at all). If your neighbors don’t behave, and I’m guessing mine weren’t, it can really hurt your performance. So then I was like, screw it, I’m getting a new server!
So I got a new VPS from lylix, and then blam! It’s been blazing ever since! My benchmarks are twice as fast as before. So maybe I didn’t have to do all those optimizations after all, though it won’t hurt to have them, especially once you beautiful people tell all your rhyming friends about b-rhymes, and the traffic really starts coming in (hint hint!).